I've written about pictures from space of ocean-borne phytoplankton blooms (see Related Posts below), but I recently saw a new one:
This one was new to me for two reasons. For one, I hadn't seen one such a bloom off the coast of Ireland before -- the three I've posted previously were south of the Equator. You can see the coast of Mayo County in Ireland there on the right. Second, it was from a satellite I'd never heard of: SPOT-5. This is a European Space Agency satellite that observes the Earth to improve our understanding of oceanography and climatology. It has 10-meter resolution, meaning it can spot objects roughly the size of a small house. The picture above shows the Earth in natural color plus infrared; the parts that look red are land-based vegetation, which reflects IR light strongly. That's why the Emerald Isle looks vermillion. Or at least ...
