Out of the Warehouse: Climate Researchers Rescue Long-Lost Satellite Images

sciencehabit (1205606) writes "Once stashed in warehouses in Maryland and North Carolina, images and video captured from orbit by some of NASA's first environmental satellites in the mid-1960s are now yielding a trove of scientific data. The Nimbus satellites, originally intended to monitor Earth's clouds in visible and infrared wavelengths, also would have captured images of sea ice, researchers at the University of Colorado's National Snow and Ice Data Center realized when they heard about the long-lost film canisters in 2009. After acquiring the film—and then tracking down the proper equipment to read and digitize its 16-shades-of-gray images, which had been taken once every 90 seconds or so—the team set about scanning and then stitching the images together using sophisticated software. So far, more than 250,000 images have been made public, including the first image taken by Nimbus-1 on 31 August 1964, of an area near the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula. Besides yielding a wealth of sea ice data, the data recovery project, which will end early next year, could also be used to extend satellite records of deforestation and sea surface temperatures."

warehouse

[rossdee]

is this from Warehouse 13?

It could be illegal.

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

These film were stored in North Carolina. It is actually illegal there [go.com] to predict sea level rise. There is some question about whether the law makers there banned the prediction of sea level rise or the banned sea level rise itself. But anyway these NASA scientists need to tread carefully in North Carolina.

only 16 shades of grey?

[ilsaloving]

They could have had a much more interesting picture if they had used 50.