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🌡️ 1. Thermometers & Historical Records

Scientists have been recording temperatures for hundreds of years using thermometers. These can measure air temperature on land or sea surface temperature in the oceans. Before digital thermometers, scientists wrote readings in weather logs and charts, creating a long record of how Earth’s temperature has changed over time.

Thermometers measure temperature in degrees Celsius (°C) or Fahrenheit (°F).

Modern thermometers use digital sensors that automatically record data every few minutes or hours.

These readings are stored in global databases like NASA and the UK Met Office.

Scientists compare new data to old records to spot patterns and trends.

Facts:

Average global temperature has risen by about 1.1°C since the late 1800s.

Some areas are warming faster than others for example, the UAE is seeing more hot days each year.

Temperature data helps scientists link climate change to heatwaves, droughts, and extreme weather.

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Earth's surface temperature has risen about 2 degrees Fahrenheit since the start of the NOAA record in 1880.

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"The key thing to take away from all of this is that the long-term trends are pretty much relentlessly up," said Gavin Schmidt, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York.

For nearly 45 years, a team of scientists at NASA's GISS has been tracking these rising temperatures and producing records and analyses of the global temperature of Earth. Each month, scientists release a dataset.

The process for producing NASA's temperature record is rigorous and complex. Here's a look at how - and why - it is done.

Scientists Collect Data from Across the Planet's Land and Ocean

Science institutions measure local temperature in many ways. On land, thermometers affixed to tens of thousands of weather stations give us precise air temperature readings. Ships and buoys floating in the ocean capture temperatures at the sea surface. These individual measurements tell us the temperature at any one place for that day and time.

Calculating an average global temperature requires collecting all of those datasets - from the land and ocean surface - and then applying a special mathematical method to the numbers.

Climate scientists focus on how temperature has changed over time. For each individual station, they calculate how the temperature has strayed from what is considered normal; these are known as anomalies. Normal, according to NASA GISS scientists, is the temperature average from the 30-year period 1951-1980. Every location is measured against that 20th century baseline.

Global Temperature is Measured with Anomalies

Think of it this way. A temperature reading taken on a mountaintop will be cooler than one taken in a nearby valley, just as the temperature under the shade of a tree will be cooler than a reading taken in a sunlight-drenched parking lot just feet away. Temperature can vary significantly over relatively short distances.

But the temperature change between two nearby locations is remarkably consistent, said Nathan Lenssen, a climate scientist at the Colorado School of Mines and the National Center for Atmospheric Research. "When it's 2 degrees warmer than normal in Denver, it's going to be 2 degrees warmer than normal at the top of Bear Peak."

That the average temperature change is similar in Baltimore and Philadelphia or in Austin and Fort Worth can be attributed to long, consistent weather patterns, meaning the temperature anomalies of weather stations within an 800-mile distance are highly correlated. This is because large-scale weather systems stretch to this distance. These correlations were first demonstrated in a 1987 paper published in the Journal of Geophysical Review by James Hansen and Sergei Lebedeff. And it has been well documented since, Schmidt said.

Is it as Simple as Averaging All the Anomalies Together?

No. For one thing, scientists must account for the varied spacing of temperature stations. There are fewer weather stations in the Sahara Desert and Antarctica, for example, than in other parts of the world.

But the fact that temperature anomalies stay consistent over distances means scientists can fill the gaps by making estimates for the areas surrounding individual weather stations. These estimates are weighted in the analysis: the closer a point on a map is to a station, the more weight it gets.

"That allows us to get coverage of nearly the entire Earth's surface, except with maybe some exceptions, like right on the ice sheets of Antarctica," Lenssen said.

Correcting for 'Urban Heat Islands'

Scientists at NASA GISS also correct for hotter than normal temperatures that could skew the results. For example, the asphalt and concrete of major roads, uncovered parking lots, and buildings absorb more heat than green spaces. As a result, temperatures in cities are typically higher than those in rural areas. Plus, additional heat is generated from a city's cars, trucks, factories, and air conditioning units.

Research shows that the impact of these urban heat islands has a miniscule effect on global temperature - about 100th of a degree, Lenssen said. Picture the size of a city compared to the size of the Pacific Ocean. Even the biggest cities aren't big enough to make a difference on a global scale.

Still, to ensure that these urban data don't make the average artificially high, scientists remove temperature measurements captured in cities or at airports before calculating averages.

Temperature Records Agree

NASA is one of several institutions that measures and tracks global temperature, along with Europe's Copernicus Climate Change Center, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Berkeley Earth, and the UK's Met Office.

The various organizations use different methods to calculate global temperature and address uncertainties. Still, the resulting estimates are in close agreement. And they match up closely to independent datasets derived from satellites and weather forecast models.

Take a look at this graph below, which shows global temperature records from the mid-1850s through 2023. (NASA's global temperature record starts in 1880 because observations based on current methods did not sufficiently cover enough of the planet prior to that time.) You can see how closely the records compare and how they've become even more aligned over time.

The records are supported by evidence contained in natural materials. Tree rings grow wider in warmer, wetter years. Ice cores - chunks of ice drilled from ice sheets or glaciers - hold clues to past temperatures. Combine that with natural evidence from coral, pollen, and cave records, and scientists can piece together records of our planet's climate dating back millions of years.

"When we say what's happening now is special, we're not just saying that because it's happening to us," Schmidt said. "We can say it with that full context of all the other things we've seen happen in the past."

Temperature records agree, and natural evidence backs it up: Global surface temperature has increased faster since 1970 than in any other 50-year period over at least the past 2,000 years.

El Niño and La Niña Don't Impact the Long-Term Trend

The temperature in any individual year can be influenced by El Niño and La Niña, climate patterns that alternately warm and cool the tropical Pacific Ocean and can have far-reaching effects on weather around the world. This warming and cooling occurs cyclically in response to change in the strength of the trade winds; then, as the ocean changes, it alters rainfall patterns. This can result in severe droughts and intense rain in different parts of the world.

Scientists study other factors that might influence global temperature, including large volcanic eruptions and reductions in shipping pollution resulting from regulations on emissions. Changes in the amount of small ash or pollution particles in the air - aerosols - can change how much solar energy gets reflected back into space, slightly cooling or warming the planet.

While volcanoes and the El Niño Southern Oscillation, or ENSO, may contribute to variability from year to year - the peaks and valleys in the line graph above - they don't alter the overall trend in temperatures. For example, a strong El Niño that began in spring 2023 likely contributed to the soaring temperatures that year, but the global heat surge continued well after El Niño abated, Schmidt noted.

Recent evidence suggests that the overall reduction in aerosol pollution, on the other hand, is playing a small role in long-term warming. For more than a century, aerosols released by the burning of fossil fuels have had a cooling effect on the climate by blocking solar radiation. Scientists estimate that this has made the planet about 0.7° F (0.4 °C) cooler than it otherwise would be, according to the 2021 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

A gradual shift toward cleaner power plants, motor vehicles, and other technologies has reduced harmful particulate matter in the atmosphere, which has improved air quality in ways that help human health. But it's likely making the planet temporarily a little warmer as a result. For instance, a 2020 international rule that sharply reduced the amount of sulfur dioxide in shipping fuel will likely also lead to some atmospheric warming, but the magnitude is small and further study is needed.

The 1.5 degree Milestone

Much public attention has focused recently on the planet's arrival or near-arrival at global temperatures about 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels. This number is significant because in the 2015 Paris Agreement, 195 nations agreed to limit global warming to below this number, "recognizing that this would significantly reduce the risks and impacts of climate change."

According to NASA's global temperature analysis, known as GISTEMP, the global temperature for 2024 was 1.28 degrees Celsius (2.30 degrees Fahrenheit) above the agency's 20 th-century baseline (1951-1980.) But NASA records show it was 1.47 degrees Celsius (2.65 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels (1850-1900.) Global average temperatures were at least 1.5 degrees above this pre-industrial average for five months in 2024 and four months in 2023, according to Schmidt.

Reaching this specific number does not necessarily ensure any specific climate impacts. "Every 10th of a degree counts, and so the impacts of 1.6 are going to be worse than the impacts of 1.5, but they're going to be better than the impacts of 1.7 or 1.8 or 1.9," Schmidt said.

"Still, it's worrying, we're seeing the impacts already, and this is what's going to keep happening until we reduce emissions," he added.

Why We Should Care About 1 to 2 Degrees of Global Warming

Why should we care about one or two degrees of warming? After all, temperatures fluctuate by many degrees every day where we live.

The temperatures we experience locally and in short periods can fluctuate significantly due to predictable, cyclical events, such as the rising and setting of the Sun and the change of the seasons, along with hard-to-predict wind and precipitation patterns.

But the global temperature mainly depends on how much energy the planet receives from the Sun and how much it radiates back into space. The energy coming from the Sun fluctuates very little by year, while the amount of energy radiated by Earth is closely tied to the chemical composition of the atmosphere - particularly the amount of heat-trapping greenhouse gases.

A one-degree global change is significant because it takes a vast amount of heat to warm all of the oceans, the atmosphere, and the land masses by that much. In the past, a one degree global drop was all it took to plunge North America and Northern Europe into the Little Ice Age. A five-degree drop was enough to bury a large part of North America under a towering mass of ice 20,000 years ago.

For perspective, Schmidt said, consider the Pliocene epoch 2.5 million years ago, which had a global temperature that was 3 degrees Celsius warmer than human pre-industrial levels. At that temperature, ice sheets were significantly smaller, possibly nonexistent, and sea levels were estimated to be dozens of feet higher than they are now.

"And now we've warmed by 1.5 degrees," Schmidt said. "We are halfway Pliocene-level warmth in just 150 years."

How NASA's Temperature Record Began

The origins of the NASA GISS temperature record can be traced back a half century and a million miles away to a study of planet Venus, a blistering planet that is kept hot by a thick atmosphere composed mostly of carbon dioxide. NASA climate scientist James Hansen was researching the atmosphere on Venus and had designed an instrument to be carried there - it snapped this image of the planet in the 1970s. But what he learned about Venus inspired him soon after to turn his attention to planet Earth where, like Venus, greenhouse gases were building up in the atmosphere.

"I resigned as principal investigator on our Venus experiment because a planet changing before our eyes is more interesting and important, and its changes will affect all humanity," Hansen said in this 2012 TED talk.

The institute published its first global temperature record in 1981, the same year that Hansen became the director of NASA GISS, a position he held until 2013. (Schmidt became director a year later.) This coincided with an article Hansen published in Science Magazine that concluded that a warming of 0.4 degrees Celsius in the 20th century was driven by rising levels of carbon dioxide.

In that article, Hansen also predicted that the planet would warm in the 1980s and that by the turn of the century, a signal of global warming would begin to emerge from the noise of natural variability. He wrote that the 21st century would see more drought, melting ice sheets, rising sea levels, and the opening of the Northwest Passage. By all accounts, he was right.

Refining the Method

The basic method of calculating global temperature, devised by Hansen and programmed by his colleague Sergej Lebedeff, was first described in that article. Over the years, the method has been refined. When Lebedeff died unexpectedly in 1990, Reto Ruedy took over the project and has since led the technical parts of the NASA GISS temperature analysis.

Over the years, Ruedy's team has added new data sources, quality controls, and adjustments to account for urban heat. Sea surface anomalies were added to land-only measurements in 1995, improving the estimates. In the late 1990s, the analysis was made public online, along with interactive web pages, "which allowed anybody to display the data in various ways," Ruedy said.

The global temperature analysis is just a small part of the work done at GISS, where scientists also use climate models to assess atmospheric changes on Earth and on other planets and exoplanets. But the temperature analysis gets the most attention, as annual and monthly records continue to be broken.

We're Seeing it at the Local Levels

When NASA started calculating the global temperature in the 1980s, you could only see the warming signal emerge when looking at the global average temperatures, Schmidt said. But we're seeing it now increasingly at the regional and local levels.

"The changes occurring in people's everyday weather experiences have become abundantly clear," he said. People are noticing changing weather patterns in storm intensity, more frequent wildfires and flooding, but also in seasonal temperature changes where they live.

The purpose of tracking global temperature "was to give people a heads up that things were changing," Schmidt said. "And things have changed."

Composed by Jenny Marder/ NASA's Earth Science News Team

Information in this piece came from the resources below and interviews with the following sources: Gavin Schmidt, Reto Ruedy, Nathan Lenssen, Peter Jacobs.

Caption for banner image: This map of Earth in 2024 shows global surface temperature anomalies, or how much warmer or cooler each region of the planet was compared to the average from 1951 to 1980. Normal temperatures are shown in white, higher-than-normal temperatures in red and orange, and lower-than-normal temperatures in blue. An animated version of this map shows global temperature anomalies changing over time, dating back to 1880. Download this visualization from NASA Goddard's Scientific Visualization Studio: https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/5450. Credit: NASA Goddard's Scientific Visualization Studio.

Download this visualization from NASA Goddard's Scientific Visualization Studio: https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/5450. Credit: NASA Goddard's Scientific Visualization Studio.

References and Sources

" AR6 Synthesis Report: Climate Change 2023" Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. March 20, 2023.

Carlowicz, Michael. (2023) " World of Change: Global Temperatures." Earth Observatory.

" Data Buoy Types " Data Buoy Cooperation Panel.

" GISS Surface Temperature Analysis (GISTEMP): Frequently Asked Questions." NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies. Last updated: Dec 1, 2023.

"GISTEMP Surface Temperature Analysis" NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies. Last updated November 26, 2024.

Hansen, J.E., et al. " Climate Impact of Increasing Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide." Science Magazine. Vol 213, Issue 4511, pp. 957-966. August 28, 1981.

Hansen, James, " Why I Must Speak Out About Climate Change." TedTalks. March 2012.

Hansen, J.E., and S. Lebedeff, " Global Trends of Measured Surface Air Temperature." Journal of Geophysical Research, Vol 92, Pages 13345-13372, November 20, 1987.

" Introduction to Synoptic Meteorology " National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Last updated May 16, 2023.

Miller, Kenneth G. et al., Ancient Sea Level as Key to the Future, Oceanography, Volume 33, No. 2. Pages 32 - 41.

Schmidt, Gavin. " We Study Climate Change. We Can't Explain Anything." The New York Times. Nov. 13, 2024.

" Paris Climate Agreement," United Nations. December 12, 2015.

Younger, Sally. " NASA Analysis Confirms a Year of Monthly Temperature Records." NASA.gov. June 11. 2024.

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This is How Scientists Measure Global Temperature - NASA Science

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The process for producing NASA's global temperature record is rigorous and complex. Here's a look at how - and why - it is done.

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Change in the average temperatures of the UAE from 1979 to 2025

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🌊 2. Ocean Buoys

Ocean buoys are floating devices anchored or drifting in the sea. They collect information about the ocean’s temperature, salt levels (salinity), currents, and wave height. Thousands of buoys around the world send data to scientists every hour via satellite.

Each buoy has sensors below the surface to measure water temperature and salinity.

Some also measure carbon dioxide levels or oxygen in the water.

The information is transmitted to research centers on land in real time.

Scientists use this data to create maps showing how oceans are warming and changing.

Facts:

Oceans absorb over 90% of the extra heat trapped by greenhouse gases.

Rising ocean temperatures cause coral bleaching, melting sea ice, and stronger tropical storms.

Salinity data helps track melting glaciers, since melting ice makes seawater less salty.

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Buoys - (Intro to Climate Science) - Vocab, Definition, Explanations | Fiveable

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Buoys are floating devices used in oceans and large bodies of water for navigation, data collection, and environmental monitoring. In the context of climate science, buoys play a crucial role in tracking ocean conditions, which are vital for understanding phenomena like the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and other climate oscillations. By providing real-time data on temperature, salinity, and currents, buoys help scientists predict climate patterns and assess their impacts on global weather systems.

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Keeping track of ocean health is critical for understanding climate change, weather patterns, and the health of important fisheries. But how do NOAA and partner scientists gather data on such a vast environment?

One big way is with buoys, ocean observing platforms that help scientists monitor the global ocean - including in remote, hard-to-reach areas. Some of these buoys float along the ocean surface, gathering data as they drift with currents (sometimes even into the paths of hurricanes!). Some, meanwhile, are moored to the ocean floor, collecting data in the same region and helping scientists observe changes over several years or decades. In honor of Ocean Month, we're highlighting five buoys that help NOAA scientists monitor and understand the ocean (and the Great Lakes, too!).

#1: Monitoring the Bering Sea with Peggy

NOAA's biophysical mooring site 2-nicknamed " Peggy "-is one tough buoy. Since 1995, Peggy has been taking year-round measurements of temperature, salt content, nitrate, chlorophyll and currents in the remote Bering Sea. Data collected by Peggy has been used by scientists to study the cold pool and loss of sea ice in the Bering Sea, a region that supports large marine mammal and bird populations and some of the most profitable and sustainable commercial fisheries in the United States.

Peggy is named for Peggy Dyson, who for 25 years, from her home in Kodiak, Alaska, reported the weather, family messages, and sometimes even paid bills for the mariners of the North Pacific Ocean.

Peggy isn't the only moored buoy gathering key ocean data in remote environments- learn more about Arctic moorings from NOAA's Pacific Marine Environmental Lab.

#2: Keeping tabs on ocean acidification with the MAPCO2 buoy

The ocean absorbs about 30 percent of the carbon dioxide (CO2) that is released in the atmosphere, and as that CO2 is absorbed, it changes the pH of the ocean. Ocean acidification poses a big risk to marine life - as waters become more acidic, corals have a harder time building their skeletons, oysters and other shellfish have a harder time building their shells, and fish can experience worrisome behavioral changes.

Moored Autonomous pCO2 (MAPCO2) buoys help scientists understand ocean acidification. There are currently 50 of these buoys worldwide, each of which is deployed either over a coral reef, in the open ocean, or in a coastal region. These buoys gather long-term data on carbon dioxide in the ocean, allowing scientists to track how ocean acidification is progressing in different regions.

One of these buoys is deployed at Cheeca Rocks, a coral reef within the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary off of Islamorada, Florida Scientists chose Cheeca Rocks because of its important coral habitat, which has managed to stay relatively healthy compared to reefs farther offshore. Scientists have been studying why these inshore patch reefs like Cheeca Rocks have been more resilient to environmental stressors, including coral disease, coral bleaching, and overfishing - and the MAPCO2 buoy helps in that effort. This buoy measures the partial pressure of CO2 (pCO2) in seawater, temperature, salinity, and pH every three hours. The data is open and available to the public.

#3: Understanding the Great Lakes with the ReCON buoy

Buoys aren't just for the ocean! NOAA Great Lakes Environmental Laboratory (GLERL) deploys buoys on the Great Lakes every spring. These 16 Real-Time Coastal Observation Network (ReCON) buoys gather a range of atmospheric and water data in the Great Lakes, including wave height, dissolved oxygen, chlorophyll, and water temperature. Data collected by ReCON buoys can help water managers keep tabs on water safety, warning of potential hypoxic (low-oxygen) events, which can affect drinking water quality. The short-term weather and water data ReCON buoys gather can help the public decide whether to hit the water for a day of boating or fishing, and the long-term data helps resource managers, educators, and researchers better understand Great Lakes health. If you're planning a day out on the Great Lakes, you can even text a buoy to get information on current wind speeds, water temperature, air temperature and more. Explore Great Lakes buoy data via the NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information data repository.

ReCON buoys aren't the only ones that help scientists monitor water quality and predict harmful algal blooms on the Great Lakes. NOAA works with the Great Lakes Observing System (GLOS), and LimnoTech, a private engineering firm, to build monitoring capacity in central Lake Erie. One LimnoTech buoy, for instance, gathers data on oxygen levels near a water intake in Cleveland, data that's then incorporated into NOAA models and allows scientists to alert water managers that this low-oxygen water -- which can be dangerous -- is too close to drinking water intakes.

#4: Understanding how the ocean affects monsoons with RAMA

Monsoons are seasonal shifts in wind that can cause heavy rain or droughts in regions from the tropics to the United States. A third of the world population depends on monsoon-driven rainfall for producing crops, so being able to understand and predict monsoons is critical to these populations - especially populations in India, which is primarily impacted by monsoons.

The Research Moored Array for African-Asian-Australian Monsoon Analysis and Prediction (RAMA) was designed to study the Indian Ocean's role in monsoons and improve monsoon forecasts. RAMA is part of the Global Tropical Moored Buoy Array, which also includes buoy arrays in the Pacific ( TAO) and Atlantic ( PIRATA) Oceans. RAMA is the newest array of the three, initiated in 2004 to better study the traditionally data-sparse Indian Ocean.

RAMA has since grown through the formation of NOAA partnerships with Indonesia and India, and with contributions by Japan, China, and the Bay of Bengal Large Marine Ecosystem program. RAMA buoys collect data on a range of atmospheric and oceanic variables, including ocean temperature, salinity, currents, wind, sea level air pressure and humidity. In 2018 India's Ministry of Earth Sciences announced their Ocean Moored Buoy Network for the Northern Indian Ocean would provide open access data to the new Indian Ocean RAMA-OMNI moored buoy array - meaning even more ocean data is now shared freely among researchers, helping improve the accuracy of forecasts.

#5: Forecasting tsunamis with the DART Buoy

DART buoys are critical tools in the effort to provide tsunami warnings to coastal communities. NOAA supports two centers - the National Tsunami Warning Center in Palmer, Alaska, and the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center in Honolulu, Hawaii-that provide forecasts and warnings of these large, dangerous waves.

DART buoys are located strategically throughout the ocean - often close to locations where earthquakes that generate tsunamis are likely to happen - and gather key data on sea surface levels as a tsunami travels past them. After a tsunami is generated by an earthquake, a sensor located at the ocean floor communicates with the DART buoy on the surface, sending info about the magnitude of the tsunami wave directly to the Tsunami Warning Centers. The centers then create an estimate of where the tsunami was generated to produce a more accurate tsunami forecast and provide communities with the appropriate alert level (either a Watch, Advisory or Warning).

NOAA's buoys are amazing tools - but they aren't the only tools we use to monitor the ocean! Learn more about the drifters, buoys, gliders and floats that are key to ocean science from NOAA's Global Ocean Monitoring and Observing Program.

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Meet 5 NOAA buoys that help scientists understand our weather, climate, and ocean health

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From algae growth and sea ice to tsunamis, moored ocean buoys are vital to understanding and predicting the ocean.

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🛰️ 3. Satellites

Satellites orbit Earth high above the atmosphere and take pictures or measure energy from the planet’s surface. They collect information about temperature, ice cover, forest growth, clouds, air pollution, and sea levels.

Satellites use sensors and cameras to observe Earth’s surface, atmosphere, and oceans.

Some measure infrared radiation to detect temperature changes.

Data is sent back to Earth and turned into maps and animations showing how the planet is changing.

Different satellites focus on different aspects — e.g. NASA’s Aqua and Terra satellites track global temperatures and cloud patterns.

Facts:

Shows how ice caps and glaciers are shrinking.

Monitors sea level rise and coastal flooding risks.

Tracks deforestation, urban growth, and air pollution.

Provides global, continuous data to compare regions and time periods.

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Five revealing satellite images show how fast our planet is changing

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Satellite images can measure changes in sea level down to a millimetre or land and ocean temperatures, so scientists can carry out a full ‘health check’.

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Lee esta historia en español aquí.

On Earth Day, people focus on the well-being of our planet, including how humans are affecting its climate. Every day of the year, the International Space Station, orbiting 250 miles above Earth, provides a wealth of data that helps with that focus.

The station is one of dozens of NASA Earth missions in orbit and provides three main platforms for studying climate change: multiple Earth-observing instruments mounted on its exterior, a platform for deploying Earth-observing CubeSats, and windows that astronauts use to take photos of the planet. Because its orbit passes over 90 percent of Earth's population and circles the planet 16 times each day, the astronauts and instruments have views of multiple locations at different times of day and night.

Scientists need to track the factors influencing climate over long periods, and the space station helps them do so. Its contributions, along with those from NASA's Applied Sciences Program, are informing climate decisions and helping humans understand and care for the planet and solve challenges created by climate change.

Some of the current investigations using instruments on the exterior of the space station to collect climate-related data include ECOSTRESS, EMIT, and SAGE III-ISS.

ECOSTRESS measures the temperature of the ground, which is hotter during the day than the air. This image of Houston, Texas in June 2022 shows temperature differences between urban surfaces, especially pavement, and cooler suburban areas.

During a heat wave in India and Pakistan in May 2022, ECOSTRESS clearly delineated urban "heat islands" that had night temperatures as high as 102 degrees Fahrenheit while nearby rural fields had cooled to about 60 F. Urban heat experts note that extreme temperatures can be deadly due to this urban heat island effect, a risk that is compounded when temperatures do not drop sufficiently at night.

Scientists are using maps created by EMIT's imaging spectrometer, including these of regions of the Sahara Desert (top) and Nevada (bottom), to assess how dust particles affect the climate. When these particles are lifted into the atmosphere by wind, they can have heating or cooling effects, depending on their composition. The red box in the image from Nevada shows the presence of a light-colored clay mineral that reflects sunlight.

"Darker colors absorb sunlight and lighter colors reflect it, so the color of dust affects the temperature," says Kate Calvin, chief scientist and senior climate advisor at NASA.

EMIT also identified more than 50 super-emitters, infrastructure that emits methane at high rates. Methane is a potent greenhouse gas, and limiting its emission is key to limiting climate change.

The thin dark layer below the blue stratosphere in this image taken in March 2022 by SAGE III-ISS contains particles from the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha'apa volcanic eruption a few months earlier. This instrument measures these tiny particles or aerosols from volcanoes and wildfires, which can remain in the upper atmosphere for years, affecting climate around the globe by scattering light from the Sun.

The instrument takes measurements of light from the Sun or Moon as it passes through Earth's atmosphere at the edge, or limb, of the planet, called occulation. As of March 2023, SAGE III-ISS has collected more than 54,000 occultation events, the vast majority of them solar.

Other investigations on the space station also contribute to climate science, including GEDI, OCO-3, DESIS, TSIS (also known as TSIS-1), and HISUI.

Crew members have taken more than 3.5 million images of Earth from the space station for Crew Earth Observations, one of the longest running records of how our planet changes over time. This program currently supports a number of studies, including of surface features such as lakes, glaciers, and volcanoes, and atmospheric processes affected by volcanic eruptions.

These photographs record growth and decline at the Toshka Lakes in southern Egypt from extreme weather events between Sept. 2002 and Nov. 2021. The lakes are natural depressions in the Sahara Desert filled by water diverted from Lake Nasser, a reservoir on the Nile River, and their water levels fluctuate depending on the flow of the river. The lakes, full in 2002 (left image) after several years of high floods, had mostly dried up by 2012 (middle image). The lakes shrank further in 2017 and 2018, then experienced rapid filling after record-breaking floods in Sudan in 2020 and 2021. The November 2021 photo (right) shows the lakes at their highest level ever, with new lakes that formed in depressions to the north and south of the eastern basin. The Toshka Lakes project was designed to provide irrigation for agricultural development and attract people away from the dense populations of the Nile Valley.

Chile's Villarrica volcano emits plumes of steam and volcanic gases after a series of minor explosions in this photo taken from the space station on Jan. 17, 2023. A streak of ash is visible on the snow-covered volcano (bottom of photo). This type of low-level activity can be one indicator of imminent volcanic activity. Villarrica is one of South America's most active volcanoes and one of the most dangerous in the southern Andes volcanic zone.

In this image taken from the space station on Sept. 26, 2022, Hurricane Ian spins just south of Cuba before heading toward Florida. Ian made landfall near Punta Gorda, FL, as a Category 4 storm on September 28. It ranks as the third most-costly U.S. hurricane on record, causing nearly $113 billion dollars in damage and 152 deaths. Studies show that climate change creates conditions leading to more rapid intensification of such storms.

CubeSats are small, box-shaped containers approximately used for technology demonstrations or tests of new types of climate science deployed from the station airlock.

NASA's HARP CubeSat, shown ready for deployment from the space station, demonstrated that these small satellites could carry a compact imaging polarimeter, an instrument that observes how light scatters off particles to determine their size, shape, and chemical composition. Interactions between these particles and clouds are an area of significant uncertainty in climate models and HARP could help reduce that uncertainty. After 777 days in space, HARP successfully ended its mission, which pioneered new technologies for observing cloud and aerosol properties from space - crucial for learning more about Earth phenomena like air pollution and climate change.

This image shows deployment of JAXA's (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) DIWATA-1 CubeSat, which observes meteorological disasters such as typhoons and localized heavy rains for the Philippines.

During its nearly 23 years in orbit, the space station has evolved into an important part of NASA's work to study Earth's climate and improve our understanding of how it is changing.

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Space Station Studies Help Monitor Climate Change - NASA

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Station provides 3 platforms to study climate change: exterior Earth-observing instruments, Earth-observing CubeSats,deployments, and windows for planet photos

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The Weather Record | Elizabeth Della Zazzera