This ECOSTRESS temperature map shows the land surface temperature throughout Los Angeles County on August 14, 2020, during a heat wave. Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech
From cities to deserts, the intense heat-gripping California is closely followed by an Earth-observing mission aboard the International Space Station.
As record temperatures and major burns shake California, NASAThe ecosystem Spaceborne Thermal Radiometer experiment on space station (ECOSTRESS) has followed the heat wave from low Earth orbit. While the primary mission of ECOSTRESS is to measure the temperature of plants that heat up as they run out of water, it can also measure and track heat-related phenomena such as heat waves, wildfires, and volcanoes.
At 15:56 PDT (18:56 EDT) on August 14, as the space station passed over Los Angeles, ECOSTRESS was able to take a snapshot of the rising temperature of the land surface across the county, home to more than 10 million people . (Land temperature is the temperature of the ground instead of the air above it.) In the first image, ECOSTRESS measures a temperature range of about 70-125 degrees Fahrenheit (21-52 degrees Celsius), with the coolest being at the coasts and mountains. The highest surface temperatures, in dark red, were found northwest of downtown Los Angeles in the San Fernando Valley. (The instrument also captured the Ranch fire, shown in the center of the image, while it was burning.) Land temperature there reached more than 125 degrees Fahrenheit (52 degrees Celsius), with an altitude of 128.3 degrees Fahrenheit (53.5 degrees Celsius) between the cities of Van Nuys and Encino.
This ECOSTRESS temperature map shows the land surface temperature around Death Valley in the Mojave Desert of California on August 16, 2020. during a heat wave. Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech
Those afternoon peaks were within range of morning surface temperatures ECOSTRESS measured two days later in Death Valley, part of the Mojave Desert of California. As shown in the second image, from August 16 at 8:50 PDT (11:50 am EDT), ECOSTRESS recorded a maximum temperature of 122.52 degrees Fahrenheit (50.29 degrees Celsius) at Furnace Creek in Death Valley National Park.
ECOSTRESS observations have a spatial resolution of about 77 by 77 yards (70 by 70 meters), allowing researchers to study surface temperature conditions up to the size of a football field. Because of the space station’s unique orbit, the mission can receive images from the same regions at different times of the day, as opposed to crossing over each area at the same time of day, like satellites in other orbits. This is beneficial if you are controlling plant stress in the same area throughout the day, for example.
The ECOSTRESS radiometer is deployed on International Space Station (ISS) on the Japanese Experimental Module – External Facility (JEM-EF) page 10. At this location, the radiometer scan is perpendicular to the ISS speed. Credit: NASA
The ECOSTRESS mission launched to the space station on June 29, 2018. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of Caltech in Pasadena, California, built and managed the mission for the Earth Science Division in the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington. ECOSTRESS is in Earth Venture Instrument mission; the program is managed by NASA’s Earth System Science Pathfinder program at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia.
