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Satellite Image of the Day: March 23, 2007
(click here for previous images of the day from RUSMART)

NOAA's Hydrometeorologial Prediction Center (HPC) "Daily National Forecast" image shows a daily national weather prediction

NOAA's National Hurricane Center

Satellites: NOAA-15, NOAA 16, NOAA 17 and NOAA-18, part of NOAA's 850km-high (530 mile-high) Polar Orbiting satellites

More "cloud art" out over the Atlantic

The image below shows the more extensive image from which the picture at the far right below was taken. The clouds far out into the Atlantic Ocean take on almost artistic patterns as the winds blow them around. This is of course the manifestation of the non-linear nature of, well, Nature.

The early development of "chaos theory" (the popular name for non-linear phenomena) was advanced greatly by the clouds that Mitchell Feigenbaum observed in his early years of work at Los Alamos. From the prologue of the book Chaos: Making a New Science by James Gleick (http://www.around.com/chaos.html):

"Even Feigenbaum's friends were wondering whether he was ever going to produce any work of his own. As willing as he was to do impromptu magic with their questions, he did not seem interested in devoting his own research to any problem that might pay off. He thought about turbulence in liquids and gases. He thought about time--did it glide smoothly forward or hop discretely like a sequence of cosmic motion-picture frames? He thought about the eye's ability to see consistent colors and forms in a universe that physicists knew to be a shifting quantum kaleidoscope. He thought about clouds, watching them from airplane windows (until, in 1975, his scientific travel privileges were officially suspended on grounds of overuse) or from the hiking trails above the laboratory. In the mountain towns of the West, clouds barely resemble the sooty indeterminate low-flying hazes that fill the Eastern air. At Los Alamos, in the lee of a great volcanic caldera, the clouds spill across the sky, in random formation, yes, but also not-random, standing in uniform spikes or rolling in regularly furrowed patterns like brain matter. On a stormy afternoon, when the sky shimmers and trembles with the electricity to come, the clouds stand out from thirty miles away, filtering the light and reflecting it, until the whole sky starts to seem like a spectacle staged as a subtle reproach to physicists. Clouds represented a side of nature that the mainstream of physics had passed by, a side that was at once fuzzy and detailed, structured and unpredictable. Feigenbaum thought about such things, quietly and unproductively. To a physicist, creating laser fusion was a legitimate problem; puzzling out the spin and color and flavor of small particles was a legitimate problem; dating the origin of the universe was a legitimate problem. Understanding clouds was a problem for a meteorologist. Like other physicists, Feigenbaum used an understated, tough-guy vocabulary to rate such problems. Such a thing is obvious, he might say, meaning that a result could be understood by any skilled physicist after appropriate contemplation and calculation. Not obvious described work that commanded respect and Nobel prizes. For the hardest problems, the problems that would not give way without long looks into the universe's bowels, physicists reserved words like deep. In 1974, though few of his colleagues knew it, Feigenbaum was working on a problem that was deep: chaos. "

What would you think if you saw the image below with Feigenbaum's eyes??

Click on the image below for a high-resolution (~200k) version.