Oil Flares Seen From Space

SkyTruth has updated its map of Global Flaring. This map shows a heatmap of nightly, infrared satellite detections of natural gas flaring across the Earth.

For toll reasons stone oil producers oftentimes flare marsh gas together with other gases produced yesteryear stone oil wells rather than recover the gases. This flaring adds huge amounts of CO2 to the atmosphere together with the gases themselves tin often pollute the air.

The map animates through nightly detections of global flaring. The animation tin hold out controlled using the timeline tool at the bottom of the map. The tool on the correct side of the map tin hold out used to select whether to persuasion private detections, ane 24-hour interval at a time, or a composite of all detections over multiple days. If you lot select to a greater extent than than ane 24-hour interval the map shows all the flares detected on the engagement displayed together with from all the preceding days.

The Global Flaring map requires a WebGL enabled browser.


The satellite measurements used inwards the Global Flaring map were made yesteryear the VIIRS sensor aboard NOAA’s Suomi NPP satellite. NOAA has also used information captured yesteryear VIIRS to exercise an interactive map of the Earth's vegetation.

The Green Vegetation map visualizes the world's vegetation. The darkest light-green areas on the map are the locations alongside the lushest vegetation. The map uses a pale color for the Earth's oceans. I'm guessing this is because if 75% of the planet was colored bluish this would detract from the vegetation beingness highlighted on the map.

You tin read to a greater extent than nearly the vegetation information together with how the map was created on the NOAA website.