Source: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio; data provided by Robert B. Schmunk (NASA/GSFC GISS). Groups of scientists from several major institutions - NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), NOAA's National Climatic Data Center (NCDC), the Japanese Meteorological Agency and the Met Office Hadley Centre in the United Kingdom. These organizations tally data collected by temperature monitoring stations spread around the world and make an announcement about whether the previous year was a comparatively warm or cool year. This analysis concerns only temperature anomalies, not absolute temperature. Temperature anomalies are computed relative to the base period 1951-1980. The reason to work with anomalies, rather than absolute temperature is that absolute temperature varies markedly in short distances, while monthly or annual temperature anomalies are representative of a much larger region. Indeed, we have shown (Hansen and Lebedeff, 1987) that temperature anomalies are strongly correlated out to distances of the order of 1000 km. For more information about this dataset, see http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp. NASA's announcement this year - that 2010 ties 2005 as the warmest year in the 131-year instrumental record - made headlines. But, how much does the ranking of a single year matter? Not all that much, emphasizes James Hansen, the director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York City. In the GISS analysis, for example, 2010 differed from 2005 by less than 0.01°C (0.018°F), a difference so small that the temperatures of these two years are indistinguishable, given the uncertainty of the calculation. Meanwhile, the third warmest year - 2009 - is so close to 1998, 2002, 2003, 2006, and 2007, with the maximum difference between the years being a mere 0.03°C, that all six years are virtually tied. Even for a near record-breaking year like 2010 the broader context is more important than a single year. "Certainly, it is interesting that 2010 was so warm despite the presence of a La Niña and a remarkably inactive sun, two factors that have a cooling influence on the planet, but far more important than any particular year's ranking are the decadal trends," Hansen said. (link)

Summary: This animation shows where the world's food is grown versus where the world's food is consumed. The movie starts with global croplands and then fades to the countries that produce over 80% of the world's wheat, grain, and cereal. It then overlays the world's population density and then fades to show the countries that are projected to double and triple their population by 2050.

Source: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center. The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) to strengthen collaboration. In support of this collaboration, NASA and the USDA Foreign Agricultural Service (FAS) jointly funded a new project to assimilate NASA's Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) data and products into an existing decision support system (DSS) operated by the International Production Assessment Division (IPAD) of FAS. To meet its objectives, FAS/IPAD uses satellite data and data products to monitor agriculture worldwide and to locate and keep track of natural disasters such as short and long term droughts, floods and persistent snow cover which impair agricultural productivity. FAS is the largest user of satellite imagery in the non-military sector of the U.S. government. For the last 20 years FAS has used a combination of Landsat and NOAA-AVHRR satellite data to monitor crop condition and report on episodic events. (link)

Source: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio. New NASA satellite-generated land cover maps are providing scientists with a detailed picture of the distribution of Earth's ecosystems and land use. These new maps, based on a global digital database of land cover types that is updated every 16 days, will help scientists better understand the Earth's climate and carbon budget, through closer monitoring of water and land resources, including forested and agricultural areas. These land-coverland cover maps were developed at Boston University in Boston, MA, using data from the Moderate-resolution Imaging -Spectroradiometer (MODIS) instrument aboard on NASA's Terra satellite. The prototype MODIS maps were created with data acquired between July and December 2000, but future maps will utilize one year of data. Advances in remote sensing technology allow MODIS to collect higher-quality data than previous sensors, yielding the most detailed land cover classification maps to date. They are also more current because the information content of MODIS data allowed scientists to exploit more efficient automated methods for categorizing land cover than was previously possible, reducing the time to generate maps from months or years to about one week. Each MODIS land cover map contains 17 different land cover types, differentiating among eleven natural vegetation types such as deciduous and evergreen forests, savannas, grasslands, permanent wetlands and shrublands. Agricultural land use, as well as several categories of land surfaces with little or no plant cover -- such as bare ground, urban areas and permanent snow and ice -- are also depicted in the maps. (link)

Source: SeaWiFS false color data showing seasonal change in the oceans and on land for Africa. The data is seasonally averaged, and shows spring, summer, fall, winter, spring, summer, and fall. NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center, The SeaWiFS Project and GeoEye, Scientific Visualization Studio. (link)