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."

Comments

Make sure they keep the originals

[Spy Handler]

As anyone who has done VR panorama stitching can tell you, software can only do so much. The output will have some issues, like things not lining up quite correctly or colors being off in one section, etc. So you have do some Photoshop work to make it look good.

Kind of like the raw data vs. adjusted data issue. If they show you the massaged data to back up a claim, but then say they accidentally lost the raw data (or outright refuse to release it, as in some cases)... well then you know they're no longer in the realm of science but a religious crusade.