In my post Our Earth truly is art I talked about Earth as Art, NASA’s e-book collection of wonderful satellite images of our planet, and posted my top 3 picks.
In NASA’s Perpetual Ocean animation I talk about a beautiful convergence of maps and art: The Turbulence of Van Gogh and the Labrador Shelf Current, and NASA’s Perpetual Ocean animation.
Here’s another gem: Van Gogh from Space Landsat 7 Acquired 7/13/2005, winner of NASA’s public contest to select the Top Five ‘Earth as Art’ Winners
A couple of months ago AGU blogger Dan Satterfield posted a great article titled The Turbulence of Van Gogh and the Labrador Shelf Current.
For getting maps and art together, I thought it could not be topped. Then today, I stumbled into NASA’s Perpetual Ocean animation: beautiful!
From the original Source: This is an animation of ocean surface currents from June 2005 to December 2007 from NASA satellites. Watch how bigger currents like the Gulf Stream in the Atlantic Ocean and the Kuroshio in the Pacific carry warm waters across thousands of miles at speeds greater than four miles per hour (six kilometers per hour); how coastal currents like the Agulhas in the Southern Hemisphere move equatorial waters toward Earth’s poles; and how thousands of other ocean currents are confined to particular regions and form slow-moving, circular pools called eddies. Credit: NASA/SVS
More media options, including a 20 minute version at 30 fps can be found here
MIT general circulation model MITgcm
ECCO2: Phase II of MIT/JPL project Estimating the Circulation and Climate of the Ocean
NASA has published a number of really good e-books on planetary science. Typically, each time I stumbled on one, I added a link on my Books page, but I could not skip writing about the latest one, which I discovered thanks to this post on FlowingData. It’s called Earth as Art, and it’s a fantastic book!
The pictures in this book are truly marvellous, and a thing of art. Here are my three favourites – I am so mesmerised by them I can’t stop looking (particularly the Ugab River one).
Enjoy. Check the book, and let me know which ones you like.
Von Kármán Vortices, Southern Pacific Ocean
Ugab River, Namibia
Shoemaker Crater, Australia