Topic
Use of orbiting satellites and sensors—lidar, multispectral imagers, aerosol cameras—to monitor Earth's atmosphere, land, ice, and surface conditions.
Australia's Darwin ash-advisory centre used ESA's EarthCARE lidar to confirm that Anak Krakatau's westward plume sat near 15 km, as forecast. That check brought a satellite built to study clouds and Earth's energy balance into aviation advice in near-real time.
Reality
Geoscience Australia's public Sentinel-2 tool maps vegetation moisture at 20-metre resolution about every five days. In the ACT, rated normal risk by the national outlook, it showed a dry south and faster drying than in most recent years.
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Passenger estimates for the two-day closure run above 300,000. The 1883 eruption that built this volcano killed about 35,000, almost all by tsunami, and that mechanism needs the edifice to collapse rather than the plume to climb.
Perspective Coverage
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The IMBIE team merged 42 independent satellite surveys from 27 missions to account for 11.3 trillion tonnes of ice lost from Greenland and Antarctica since 1979, and it assigns 84% of that loss to glaciers accelerating into the ocean.
Perspective Coverage
3 publishersReality
Lake Powell's surface read 3,517.24 feet on September 10, the lowest on record, after the Upper Colorado Basin's 2025-2026 snowpack came in thin and record warmth took more of it before the melt reached the river.
Reality
An ESA-led team pooled 45 surveys from 27 satellites to weigh Greenland and Antarctica back to the 1970s. It finds 11.3 trillion metric tons of ice gone since 1979, five-sixths of it to water working from below.
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A small, routinely active volcano between Java and Sumatra produced a day of explosive eruption whose effects on flying and on air quality took several days to clear, and the flight tally in circulation comes from news reports.
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A Peking University-led team matched US forest inventories to satellite productivity and found that heat and moisture extremes arriving together hurt more than either alone, with species-rich plots dipping less and recovering faster.
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Puerto Rico held no drought at all three months before August 25, when the U.S. Drought Monitor put 44 percent of the territory in extreme drought and rationing was already running in several municipalities.
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By September 3 the Northeast Pacific had 15 named storms and six hurricanes against the Atlantic's five and none, the split forecasters called back in spring. A basin tally, though, says nothing about where the rain lands.
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A University of Tokyo-led team fed satellite isotope ratios into a weather model and got better winds, temperature and humidity out of it, which is the first evidence that a long-theorized upgrade pays off in a setup close to how forecasters actually run.
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Cities that write emission plans alone are, on this evidence, optimising a number that is partly set elsewhere. The size of that outside share is modelled rather than measured, which changes what a mayor can do with it.
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A Sentinel-1 radar pass caught the Aug. 4 break at Greenland's Petermann Glacier a day early. The two rifts still holding cover about 2.3 times the area that just left.
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A PNAS study finds parts of the Sacramento Valley collapsed during the 2020-2022 drought and have not rebounded, which undercuts the idea that wet years always restore what dry years remove.
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NASA says the utility feeds VIIRS snow-cover and vegetation products into machine-learning river forecasts that shape releases at Mayfield and Mossyrock. The 2026 water year tested both directions.
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A new grading method scores models on satellite radiation trends rather than past surface temperatures, and the ones previously discounted come out on top.
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Malawi's 2016 drought policy failed not because the automation broke but because the crop model was fitted to a maize variety farmers had abandoned. The check that would have caught it ran after the season.
Reality