Posted on 06/28/2004 8:30:41 AM PDT by cogitator
I thought this was fitting for a week just before the Fourth of July. The image below is the very low resolution image. If you click it, you'll get the high-resolution (large) JPEG. If you go to the linked article page above, you can download an 11.0 MB TIFF image. I thought that the isolation of Bermuda was particularly striking in this image. Also of note (on quick perusal): White Sands National Monument, two-toned Great Salt Lake, the turquoise Bahamas Banks, strange sediment patterns in northern Lake Erie, the Painted Desert.
** ping **
Looks like someone took an eggbeater to the Rockies around Colorado!
Amazing, and they say there is no Creator!
Sounds like it's a good year for corn all the way around the country. Here in Illinois, we've had a wet spring and the corn is 4-5 feet high. It normally reaches 6-7 feet. I'd say it's about 2 weeks ahead of normal.
Bermuda ...
That 11.0 is a beauty - I'm amazed at the detail.
I found the snow-capped mountain I live on the NW shoulder of.
Remarkable.
While that may be, it may also be due to sampling. Reading the page that hosts this image, it indicates that the image was created from data acquired over 500 orbits, and over the years 2000-2004 (it's a composite image). So presumably they merged areas from images that were essentially cloud-free. It may be that the least cloudy periods in California are when the Central Valley appears dry, such as in winter. However, it's also worth noting that California has been fighting a drought over most of that period, so the observation that the Central Valley looks dry may still be applicable. (Also note that they apparently didn't use images from autumn; the forests on the East Coast turn an observable orange-reddish brown in autumn.)
Ack - now you're going to tempt me to download it. And I think my computer will choke trying to display it...
St. Helens doesn't provide that much more sediment to the Columnbia now. But the Columbia carries quite a bit of sediment due to erosion in the Cascade Range.
I switched two months ago to LincSat, which downloads at about 140K/sec.
Compared to my former dialup service, that's light-speed!
It's an amazing map - I'll be following my memories of SouthWest camping trips past all day! ;^)
Also, after orienting on the Rockies, I was able to locate Great Sand Dunes National Monument, which is on my list of unusual places I've visited.
Enjoy!
Way cool. Thanks.
Right you are. I am the person who created the image and, not surprisingly, the clear days fall generally in the dry seasons of the different regions. I tried to find the best scenes of California when there were some crops showing (always something growing somewhere there). Right again about the East Coast. The autumn is generally clear, but the Appalachians are orange-brown. My goal was to get a clear summer across the country - not so easy.
For anyone interested, the really high resolution version of this is at 278m and is a 1.9GB TIFF image (360MB compressed) - 34500x18000 or so. The high quality jpeg is about 55MB.
Hey, thanks for the information!
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