Marine stratocumulus clouds stretched across the southern Indian Ocean in early March 2013. The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA\u2019s Aqua satellite acquired this natural-color image on March 11, as a striking band of clouds ran roughly northwest to southeast over the open ocean. Earth\u2019s boundary layer extends upward from the land or ocean surface to roughly 2 kilometers (1 mile) in altitude, and it is the part of the atmosphere where interactions with the planet surface have the strongest effects. Patrick Minnis of NASA\u2019s Langley Research Center explains that the clouds in this image likely formed underneath a strong inversion, in which air above the boundary layer was sinking. \u201cThe clouds in the northwest are below one kilometer in altitude,\u201d Minnis noted, \u201cwhile the remaining clouds, which are thicker and more developed, are between one and two kilometers.\u201d Image Credit: NASA<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Marine stratocumulus clouds stretched across the southern Indian Ocean in early March 2013. The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA\u2019s Aqua satellite acquired this natural-color image on March 11, as a striking band of clouds ran roughly northwest to southeast over the open ocean. Earth\u2019s boundary layer extends upward from the land or ocean surface to roughly 2 kilometers (1 mile) in altitude, and it is the part of the atmosphere where interactions with the planet surface have the strongest effects. Patrick Minnis of NASA\u2019s Langley Research Center explains that the clouds in this image likely formed underneath a strong inversion, in which air above the boundary layer was sinking. \u201cThe clouds in the northwest are below one kilometer in altitude,\u201d Minnis noted, \u201cwhile the remaining clouds, which are thicker and more developed, are between one and two kilometers.\u201d Image Credit: NASA<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":612598,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-187369","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-nasa-i-o-d"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/187369","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=187369"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/187369\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/612598"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=187369"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=187369"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=187369"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}