Contrails over the Appalachians (MODIS 2019-11-04)

If you find yourself on an airplane flight this fall, don’t forget to look out the window. Colorful fall foliage is sweeping across forests and shrublands across the Northern Hemisphere. On the morning of October 28, 2019, the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite captured this true-color imageview of criss-crossing contrails hovering over a stretch of the Appalachian Mountains in Kentucky, Virginia, and West Virginia. Many of the forests were near peak color. The mix of tree species in eastern deciduous forests make for varied and colorful displays of fall foliage. Ash, beech, and poplar leaves turn yellow; red maples, sumac, and dogwood tend toward red; and leaves of oaks often become brown. Leaves change colors as they lose chlorophyll, the molecule that plants use to synthesize food. Chlorophyll normally makes plant leaves look green because it absorbs red and blue light as sunlight strikes leaf surfaces. However, chlorophyll is unstable, and plants have to continuously make it, a process that requires plenty of sunlight and warm temperatures. So when temperatures drop and days shorten in autumn, levels of chlorophyll do as well. This c

Date

October 28, 2019

Mapmaker / publisher

MODIS Land Rapid Response Team, NASA GSFC

Archive

Wikimedia Commons

Type

map

Original size

2,509 × 2,077 pixels

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