The ocean is a beautiful thing/place/creation/blessing. Take one good look at the sun setting over the Pacific and every once in a while you’ll pinch yourself just to make sure you’re not looking at a painting. The same could easily be said when you’re free diving in the tropics. And apparently these laws apply from space as well.
In late September, NASA used the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite to snap this photo of a phytoplankton bloom in the Atlantic Ocean. VIIRS can measure everything from sea and land surface temperature to cloud and aerosol properties, giving scientists a way to physically see climate change all over the globe. Here, known data of the amount of chlorophyll in the North Atlantic was combined with data of red, green and blue bands from VIIRS.
“The image does a beautiful job of showing the close link between ocean physics and biology,” said Michael Behrenfeld, a phytoplankton ecologist at Oregon State University. “The features that jump out so clearly represent the influence of ocean eddies and physical stirring on the concentration of phytoplankton pigments and, possibly colored dissolved organic matter.”
Shortly after, scientists took the recorded data from the photo and traveled to the same stretch over the Atlantic. They then took measurements with ship and ocean based tools to study the seasonal phytoplankton blooms and their impact on the environment.
