The Santa Ana winds that typically blow through Southern California during late
fall and winter swept large amounts of dust and ash across the skies of San Diego
and over the Pacific Ocean on November 27, 2003. The intense brush fires that had
swept through the foothills of this region in October left soils exposed and
vulnerable to such strong winds.
In this image pair from the Multi-angle Imaging SpectroRadiometer (MISR), a
false-color nadir image (left) highlights the burnt areas, while a 3-D stereo
anaglyph image (right) accentuates the dust and indicates the relative height above
the surface of the dust and ash blown aloft from the hills that were burnt. The two
images cover the same area and have been oriented with north toward the left in
order to facilitate stereo viewing. Burnt areas appear in brown hues and highly
vegetated areas appear red in the left-hand view, which was constructed with
near-infrared, green and blue band data from MISR's vertical-viewing (nadir)
camera. The accentuation of the dust and ash plumes in the anaglyph is due to the
use of imagery from two of MISR's oblique-viewing cameras. Here, red band data from
MISR's 70° forward-viewing and 60° forward-viewing cameras are displayed as red and
green/blue, respectively. The anaglyph makes it possible to see height variations
of the surface terrain, dust and ash plumes, and a few high clouds, but height
variations can only be observed in 3-D with the aid of red/blue glasses.
Information on ordering glasses can be found at
http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/Help/VendorList.html#Glasses .
The Multi-angle Imaging SpectroRadiometer observes the daylit Earth continuously
and every 9 days views the entire globe between 82° north and 82° south latitude.
These data products were generated from a portion of the imagery acquired during
Terra orbit 20976. The panels cover an area of about 144 kilometers x 237
kilometers, and use data from blocks 64 to 65 within World Reference System-2 path
40.
MISR was built and is managed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory,
Pasadena, CA, for NASA's Office of Earth Science, Washington, DC. The
Terra satellite is managed by NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center,
Greenbelt, MD. JPL is a division of the California Institute of Technology.
Image credit: NASA/GSFC/LaRC/JPL, MISR Team.
Text acknowledgment: Clare Averill (Raytheon / Jet Propulsion Laboratory).
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