id region like the southwestern United States.
On January 22–24, 2016, a major winter storm dropped 2 or more feet of snow on much of the U.S. East Coast. Landsat 8 images acquired before and after the storm offer a dramatic view of the Washington, DC, area. Before the storm, there was no snow on the ground; however, on January 24 the landscape had become blanketed in white.
In both of these natural color images, the Washington Monument casts a shadow, but the shadow shows up more clearly when the ground is white.
In the lower right part of the image, Andrews Field at Joint Base Andrews becomes a large swath of bright white in the January image. Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, just south of DC, also exhibits this extra brightness. At Reagan, the main runway appears to have been cleared.
Warm temperatures in December meant the Potomac River was not frozen in the December image. By mid-January, parts of the Potomac froze, so some of the river is covered in white in the January image.
These Landsat images show the land use changes of the Liaodong Bay area in northeastern China. The Shuangtaizi River and the Daliao River carry large amounts of sediment from the loess plains and agricultural soil erosion upstream. The salt marshes on the river delta have been affected by an expanding aquaculture industry, visible as the dark geometrical shapes that have clearly expanded in the 2015 image. Also visible is the expanding city of Yingkou and ports extending into Liaodong Bay.
Salt marshes in this region decreased during the 1980s and early 2000s. Aquaculture ponds, and rice paddy and reed fields replaced the salt marsh; however, from 2004 to 2009, salt marshes showed a slow recovery. Researchers use Landsat imagery to monitor the recovery as well as human uses of this land to track salt marsh extent from year to year and how those changes affect habitats and wildlife.
Satellite images are necessary for this monitoring because large areas can be mapped relatively quickly where it is difficult to conduct field surveys. The 30-meter resolution of Landsat provides enough detail for remote sensing scientists to observe and quantify such changes.
Lithium Mining in Salar de Atacama, Chile January 19, 2016
The Salar de Atacama in Chile is a large, dry salt flat surrounded by mountain ranges and is one of the driest places on Earth. Parts of the Atacama Desert have gone without rain for as long as people have been keeping track, but water rich in dissolved salts lies beneath this flat surface. The Salar is particularly rich in lithium salts.
Lithium is used in rechargeable batteries. With increased use of smartphones, mobile computers, and electric cars, there is higher demand for the soft, silvery metal.
Brines from beneath the salty crust are pumped to evaporation ponds, visible as the blue rectangles in these Landsat images. The extremely dry and windy conditions here result in an efficient process. The concentrated salts are left behind after evaporation from which lithium carbonate and other materials can be extracted.
The lithium mining activities in the Salar de Atacama have expanded over the years, as can be seen in these Landsat images acquired in 1993 and 2015. Landsat imagery can help study worldwide land change effects from a variety of mining types.
New Year’s Flooding in the Midwest January 6, 2016
At the end of 2015, a series of storms dropped 6–10 inches of rain in a few days over the central part of the United States. Missouri and Illinois were particularly hard hit, with many waterways overflowing their banks.
Water has receded in most places, but a Landsat 7 image acquired January 1, 2016, clearly shows an example of the extent of the flooding. Flowing north to south at the top center of the image is the Wabash River, which forms the border between Illinois and Indiana. The Wabash flows into the Ohio River.
Water is blue in these images. The December 8, 2015, image shows the rivers at normal water levels. The January 1 image shows the swollen Wabash and Ohio Rivers, each of them submerging the floodplains. Sm