Image of the week: swirling cloud art in the Atlantic Ocean
23 Jan 2012
This false-colour Envisat image highlights a unique cloud formation, created by ‘Von Karman vortices’, south of the Canary Island archipelago, some 95 km from the northwest coast of Africa (right) in the Atlantic Ocean.
(JPG, 2.0 Mb)
Unique cloud formation, created by ‘Von Karman vortices’, pictured by Envisat on 6 June 2010.
Credit: ESA.
Von Karman vortices, named after aeronautical engineer Theodore von Karman, form as air flows around an object in its path, causing it to separate and create eddies in its wake.
The clockwise and counterclockwise spirals in this image were created as wind blowing from the north over the Atlantic was disturbed by the archipelago.
Seven larger islands and a few smaller ones make up the Canaries; the larger islands are (left to right): El Hierro, La Palma, La Gomera, Tenerife, Gran Canaria, Fuerteventura and Lanzarote.
Tenerife is the largest of the Canaries, while Gran Canaria is the most populated. UNESCO declared La Palma a Biosphere Reserve in 1983.
This image was acquired by Envisat’s Medium Resolution Imaging Spectrometer on 6 June 2010 at a resolution of 300m.
Envisat is Europe's largest and most sophisticated Earth observation satellite. The spacecraft is around the size of a double-decker bus and has ten instruments on board monitoring everything from air to agriculture, oceans to ozone. Day and night, whatever the weather, Envisat is providing information on the state of the planet we live on.
From conception to design, building and operation of Envisat, UK scientists and industry partners have been at the forefront of the satellite's progress.
Many UK teams are involved in collecting and analysing results from Envisat with more than 1,200 scientific projects across Europe currently using data from this mission. More information about UK involvement in Envisat can be found in the missions section of the website.
