Hurricane Katrina from Chicago

The outer cirrus clouds from Katrina, seen this evening in Chicago.

Salton Sea Algal Bloom animation

True Story: I developed this animation _before_ discovering Jacques Descloitres of the MODIS Rapid Response Team, NASA/GSFC's work. It does say there is an animation available but I haven't seen it from anywhere. What I had done was I searched the TERRA gallery with "Salton" and grabbed a long series of images from there to make an animation, without the knowledge that the set had probably been created for that purpose. Since I can't find the animation, here is my attempt. I cropped the originals down to 720x610 and used Imageready to animate it.

Salton Sea Algal Bloom -- Warning -- 18MB

Watch for the irrigated fields in the Imperial Valley blink on and off over time in the animation.

Yum... algae!

Just perusing TERRA images again, and I noticed the Salton Sea has a nice algal bloom going right now. Too many phosphates from farm runoff and lots of sunlight & warm temperatures = yuck!