Heavens

Tropical Storm Lekima intensified quickly early on Oct. 22 while traveling over the open waters of the Northwestern Pacific Ocean. The day before the rapid intensification, NASA's TRMM satellite passed overhead and analyzed the rainfall rates in the storm, spotting heavy rainfall in two quadrants.

As firefighters emerge from another record wildfire season in the Western United States, University of California, Berkeley, scientists say it's time to give them a 21st century tool: a fire-spotting satellite.

Such a satellite could view the Western states almost continuously, snapping pictures of the ground every few seconds in search of hot spots that could be newly ignited wildfires. Firefighting resources could then be directed to these spots in hopes of preventing the fires from growing out of control and threatening lives and property.

The twenty-eighth tropical depression of the Northwestern Pacific Ocean tropical cyclone season developed and strengthened into Tropical Storm Lekima.

On Oct. 21 at 1500 UTC/11 a.m. EDT, Tropical Storm Lekima had maximum sustained winds near 55 knots/63.2 mph/101.9 kph. It was centered near 13.6 north and 159.4 east, about 815 nautical miles/ 937.9 miles/1,509 km east of Saipan. Lekima was moving to the north-northwest at 10 knots/11.5 mph/18.5 kph.

Several of NASA's fleet of Earth-observing satellites have been gathering data on Typhoon Francisco as it moves toward Japan. NASA's Aqua, Terra and TRMM satellites captured infrared, visible and rainfall data on the super typhoon.

As Japan still recovers from Typhoon Wipha, the country is now expecting Francisco to make a brief landfall near Tokyo and parallel the country's east coast.

Low pressure System 96E developed quickly over the weekend of Oct. 19 and 20 and by Oct. 21 had grown into Hurricane Raymond. Before Raymond exploded into a major hurricane NASA's Terra satellite flew overhead from space and NOAA's GOES satellite provided images of Raymond as a major hurricane.

On Oct. 19 at 11 p.m. EDT, System 96E organized into Tropical Depression 17-E about 205 miles/330 km south of Acapulco, Mexico. By 5 a.m. EDT on Oct. 20, the depression strengthen into Tropical Storm Raymond.

The thirteenth tropical depression of the Atlantic Ocean season formed today, Oct. 21 and NOAA's GOES-East satellite captured its development. NASA's GOES Project created an animation from the NOAA satellite imagery that shows the depression's development over three days.

NASA will conduct a sounding rocket launch at 2 p.m. EDT, Monday, Oct. 21, 2013, from the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico carrying an experiment to support the calibration of the EUV Variability Experiment, or EVE, aboard the Solar Dynamics Observatory, or SDO, satellite. EVE measures the total extreme ultraviolet output of the sun, called its irradiance.

ANN ARBOR, Mich. – Most parents would love to get an e-mail response from their kids' health care provider for a minor illness rather than making an office visit, but about half say that online consultation should be free, according to a new University of Michigan C.S. Mott Children's Hospital National Poll on Children's Health.

A quick glance at a world precipitation map shows that most tropical rain falls in the Northern Hemisphere. The Palmyra Atoll, at 6 degrees north, gets 175 inches of rain a year, while an equal distance on the opposite side of the equator gets only 45 inches. Scientists long believed that this was a quirk of the Earth's geometry – that the ocean basins tilting diagonally while the planet spins pushed tropical rain bands north of the equator. But a new University of Washington study shows that the pattern arises from ocean currents originating from the poles, thousands of miles away.

Typhoon Francisco passed west of Guam on Oct. 18 as NASA and the Japan Space Agency's TRMM satellite passed overhead and measured its heavy rainfall. Francisco is forecast to intensify into a super typhoon.

Francisco developed in the Western Pacific Ocean on October 16, 2013. The Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission satellite called TRMM passed over on October 18, 2013 at 1002 UTC/6:02 a.m. EDT when Typhoon Francisco was located west-northwest of Guam.

Powerful Typhoon Wipha never made landfall in the northwestern Pacific but affected several land areas there as seen by NASA's Aqua and Terra satellites. By Oct. 18, extra-tropical storm Wipha moved into the Bering Sea and was bringing rains, warmer temperatures and gusty winds to Alaska.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass-- A central topic in spoken-language-systems research is what's called speaker diarization, or computationally determining how many speakers feature in a recording and which of them speaks when. Speaker diarization would be an essential function of any program that automatically annotated audio or video recordings.

Shuangyashan is a coal mining prefecture-level city located in the eastern part Heilongjiang province, People's Republic of China, bordering Russia's Khabarovsk and Primorsky krais to the east. Since China is known to have underground coal fires it is not unreasonable to posture that the fires seen on this satellite image might be from coal seam fires. The number of coal fires burning under the Earth's surface at any given time is not known, but it is reasonable to assume that anywhere that coal is present, fire may be as well.

The Indian state of Punjab has two growing seasons—one from May to September and another from November to April. In November, Punjab farmers typically sow crops such as wheat and vegetables; but before they do that, farmers often set fire to fields to clear them for planting. That was probably the case on October 18, 2013, when the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA's Aqua satellite captured this natural-color image.

While consumption of soda and other sugary drinks among young children in California is starting to decline, a new study released today shows an alarming 8 percent spike among adolescents, the biggest consumers of these beverages.