This Earth Day we invite you to explore our planet with imagery available through NASA's Worldview satellite imagery exploration tool. In the following images, you'll see tropical cyclones developing, reservoirs filling after torrential rain, wildfires spreading, and urban centers expanding. With NASA Worldview, you can also take a snapshot, create an animated GIF, or compare imagery from two dates to view changes over time. Start your Worldview explorations with these examples:

Learn more about NASA Earth science data and exploring these data in Worldview:

This true-color image from the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) instrument aboard the NOAA-20 satellite shows Hurricane Ian making landfall just south of Punta Gorda, Florida, on September 28, 2022. Ian was a Category 5 hurricane with wind speeds of 155 miles per hour. The powerful storm caused a catastrophic storm surge south of Tampa that, along with over 20 inches of rain, caused major flooding across the peninsula all the way to the Atlantic coast.

These Harmonized Landsat Sentinel-2 (HLS) images were acquired by the Multi-Spectral Instrument aboard the ESA (European Space Agency) Sentinel-2A and Sentinel-2B satellites. On December 1, 2022, the water level in California's San Luis reservoir (the fifth largest in the state) was estimated to be at one-quarter of its capacity. Thanks to the series of atmospheric rivers that brought record-breaking amounts of rain and snow to the state in early 2023, the reservoir is now nearly full.

This Black Marble Nighttime Blue/Yellow Composite (Day/Night Band) image from the VIIRS instrument aboard the NASA/NOAA Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership (Suomi NPP) satellite shows the Mullica River Fire burning southeast of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and northwest of Atlantic City, New Jersey, on June 20, 2022. The fire ignited on June 19, 2022, and grew to more than 12,000 acres over a 24-hour period. Fortunately, by the evening of June 21, the fire was mostly contained.

The massive B-22 iceberg, originally the size of Rhode Island, still measures more than 3,000 square kilometers and has only moved 100 km (60 miles) from where it calved off from the once extensive floating ice tongue of Antarctica’s Thwaites Glacier in 2002.

The population of metropolitan Las Vegas has grown significantly over the last 30 years, from 530,000 people in 1984 to more than 2.8 million in 2022. HLS imagery and data support a wide range of applications, such as assessments of plant health, ecological monitoring, impacts of fires and other natural hazards, population growth, and more.

Whether you are a scientist, an educator, a student, or just interested in learning more about how to use all the openly available data in NASA’s Earth Observing System Data and Information System (EOSDIS) collection, we have the resources to help! NASA's Earthdata Learn page will help you find what you need to get started with NASA Earth science data, services, and tools.

Getting Started with NASA Worldview Tutorial (December 2021)

In this tutorial, learn how to use NASA's Worldview imagery mapping and visualization application. We'll show you how to explore and visualize over 1,000 NASA Earth science satellite imagery layers, many of which are available within hours, even minutes, and spanning back 20 years. Worldview has been used for time-critical applications such as monitoring and managing wildfires, supporting science through easy-to-access satellite imagery archives, illustrating disasters and natural events in the media, and facilitating education and outreach. We show you how to create and export an image snapshot, animate imagery to see changes over time, compare imagery from different dates or different types of imagery from the same date, explore vector data layers like Fires and Thermal Anomalies, and much more!