[SDI-Africa] recent satellite images from NASA's Earth Observatory (Sudan & Namibia)

[Kate Lance]

recent images from NASA's Earth Observatory
 
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Newsroom/NewImages/images.php3?img_id=17833
Lush vegetation fuels locust outbreak in Sudan 
Rain is both a blessing and a curse in the deserts of northern Africa and southwest Asia. While water brings life, it also creates the conditions that bring crop-destroying locusts. On November 5, 2007, Locust Watch of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations warned of an outbreak of desert locusts in Sudan. While not yet severe enough to cause extensive damage, the bands and small swarms of locusts had the potential to develop into more dangerous swarms. This image shows the conditions that allowed large groups of locusts to develop.
 
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Newsroom/NewImages/images.php3?img_id=17840
Phytoplankton bloom off Namibia 
A flash of blue and green lit the waters off Namibia in early November 2007 as a phytoplankton bloom grew and faded in the Atlantic Ocean. The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Aqua satellite captured this photo-like image on November 8, 2007. The bloom stretches from north to south along hundreds of kilometers, though it is brightest in the center of this image. Such blooms are common in the coastal waters off southwest Africa where cold, nutrient-rich currents sweep north from Antarctica and interact with the coastal shelf. At the same time, the easterly trade winds push surface water away from the shore, allowing water from the ocean’s floor to rise to the surface, bringing with it iron and other material. The suffusion of nutrients from both the currents and upwelling water creates an environment where tiny surface-dwelling ocean plants (phytoplankton) thrive.


      ____________________________________________________________________________________
Be a better sports nut!  Let your teams follow you 
with Yahoo Mobile. Try it now.  http://mobile.yahoo.com/sports;_ylt=At9_qDKvtAbMuh1G1SQtBI7ntAcJ
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.gsdi.org/pipermail/sdi-africa/attachments/20071126/0d3ed64a/attachment.html