In some areas, winds tend to blow in roughly the same general direction all year”the Grand Erg Oriental, a sprawling sea of sand dunes in the Saharan Desert, isn't one of them. The winds in northeastern Algeria are complex, swirling in different directions at the same time.
Though water levels on the South Platte River were receding, muddy brown water was still far out of the river's banks near Greeley, Colo., on Sept. 17, 2013, when Landsat 8’s Operational Land Imager acquired this image.
We live on a dynamic, restless planet. On any given day, there's usually a cyclone, tropical depression or extra-tropical storm brewing somewhere on Earth. But for a brief moment in early September, the skies over all the oceans were relatively calm.
Guadalupe Island is a volcanic edifice 240 kilometers (150 miles) off the coast of Mexico's Baja California peninsula. On Aug. 4, 2013, this astronaut photograph shows the effect of winds blowing from the north (left) across the island, giving rise to a series of atmospheric eddies that appear as circles and swirls in the clouds downwind.
This photograph from the International Space Station highlights a late-summer whiting event visible across much of Lake Ontario. Such events commonly occur in late summer and are caused by changes in water temperature, which allows fine particles of calcium carbonate to form in the water column.
Over thousands of years, retreating glaciers scoured and carved out much of the basin that now holds Lake Michigan. But in some parts of the lake, patches of erosion-resistant rock still protrude above the water. A cluster of small islands in the far northern reaches of the lake includes the Beaver Island archipelago.
For the entire month of July and the first half of August, eastern China baked in a record-breaking heat wave. Nineteen provinces endured above-normal temperatures. Shanghai broke its all-time record high three times in as many weeks. At least 40 people have died during the heat wave, including 10 in Shanghai, according to the Xinhua news service.
On July 26, 2013, thunderstorms passed over southern Oregon, and lightning ignited dozens of difficult-to-control wildfires. Persistently dry weather since the beginning of 2013 had primed forests to burn, and nearly all of southern Oregon was in a state of severe or moderate drought. The Douglas complex north of Glendale, the largest of the fires, has scorched nearly 45,500 acres and now is 50 percent contained, according to The Oregonian.
Nearly every day in July 2013, the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer sensor on NASA's Aqua and Terra satellites observed dust blowing from Sudan out over the Red Sea. On some days, the sea was cloaked in a cloud of yellow. On other days, distinct plumes stretched out over the water, as captured in this time-lapse montage of satellite images.
The longest and fastest moving glacier in West Antarctica calved a new iceberg in July 2013, as shown in this Terra satellite image.
