The novel coronavirus led to changes in human activities
around the globe. As a result of city-to-country-wide lockdowns,
some bodies of water have run clearer, emissions of pollutants have temporarily
declined, and transportation and shipment of goods have decreased.
We can see some of these changes from space.
NASA, ESA and JAXA have partnered to make
data from their fleet of satellites accessible on the new COVID-19
Earth Observation Dashboard. You can search through
various signals of the COVID lockdowns as they’re visible from space.
When you arrive at the dashboard, you have a few choices for digging
into the data. On the left side, you can sort the observations by
country or by type of data indicator. We’ll walk through a few of these.
When you select an indicator, points on the map where those data
are available will turn either green, blue, red or gray
to indicate if the data are better than, the same as, or worse
than the average baseline, or still being processed and uploaded.
First up: Economic indicators. We’ll start with import
production sites: status of metallic ores. Points on the map
where these data are available turned blue. We’ll look at Dunkirk in France.
A chart shows how many ships were available at piers
over time in imagery from Sentinel-2.
We can also look at finished goods production, like in Beijing.
Clicking on the blue dot pulls up a chart showing how many new cars were
visible in ALOS-2 and Sentinel-1 satellite imagery.
You can click to read more and see the satellite imagery.We can see
other economic indicators, like electric lights seen from space.
We’ll look at California. Clicking on the EO Data button
zooms into the imagery from the NASA-NOAA Suomi-NPP satellite.
You can compare lights from before and during the COVID lockdowns and you can zoom
in even further for a closer look at the images.
We can also investigate environmental indicators, like air
quality. We’ll look at the concentration of nitrogen dioxide,
an air pollutant released by human activities like driving cars
measured by the TROPOMI instrument from Copernicus Sentinel-5P
satellites. You can compare global NO2
concentrations from before and during COVID lockdowns or zoom and
pan to specific locations. Using the
greenhouse gases indicator, we can investigate similar measurements of global
carbon dioxide from OCO-2 over the entire planet and
GOSAT satellites over individual city areas. We’ll click on Global
Indicator for the difference between 2020 and prior years.
You can also click on cities like Tokyo and see greenhouse
gas column data for the annual change over the last few months.
Water quality data over a time series in the North
Adriatic Sea, show a drop and then subsequent increase in chlorophyll
concentrations, which might reflect changes in both natural conditions like winds and
currents and in human activities like agriculture and sewage runoff.
You can also compare chlorophyll concentrations in
coastal areas, like the Venice lagoon, where the drop is partly the result
of decreased human activity.There are more data indicators to come,
so you can continue to explore the changes caused by COVID-19
lockdowns, as we see them from space.
NASA