false color heat map of the Gulf Stream in the Atlantic ocean.
Stretching from tropical Florida to the doorstep of Europe, this river of water carries a lot of heat, salt, and history. The Gulf Stream is an important part of the global ocean conveyor belt that moves water and heat across the North Atlantic from the equator toward the poles. It is one of the strongest currents on Earth, and one of the most studied. It’s discovery is often attributed to Benjamin Franklin, though sailors likely knew about the current long before they had a name for it. This image shows a small portion of the Gulf Stream as it appears in infrared imagery. Data for this image was acquired on April 9, 2013, by the Thermal Infrared Sensor (TIRS) on the Landsat 8 satellite. TIRS observes in wavelengths of micrometers and micrometers. The image above is centered at ° North latitude, ° West longitude, about 500 kilometers (300 miles) east of Charleston, South Carolina. (The downloadable KML and GeoTIFF files will allow you to see it on a map.) “Infrared bands measure how much energy is emitted by the surface of the Earth at particular wavelengths,” said Matthew Montanaro, a researcher on NASA’s Landsat team. “We can calculate the surface temperature from these measurements through math and some modeling. Essentially, the higher the infrared signal measured, the higher temperature on the surface. This allows researchers to get a measurement of sea surface temperature without having to directly measure the water temperature on site. “For several locations around the world, however, there are floating buoys that can directly measure the sea temperature,” he added. “We can compare these buoy measurements with the TIRS image-derived temperatures and adjust our calibration to provide a more accurate temperature calculation for TIRS and other satellites.” For a phenomenon such as the Gulf Stream, the sensitivity and relatively high resolution of the TIRS instrument allows scientists to tease out the micro structures within the much wider
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Photo credit: © B.A.E. Inc. / Alamy / Afripics
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