Credit: NASA/ESA

A close-up of a coronal mass ejection billowing out from the Sun into space from the LASCO instrument.

Solar Flare and Geomagnetic Storm

The series of Earth-directed solar flares received unprecedented media coverage. Virtually every media outlet our monitoring services measure repeatedly covered the eruptions and resulting geomagnetic storms. By Wednesday, October 29th, our monitoring service had picked up over 2000 television stories, which created what Neilson services calls over 200 million "impressions."

The Google News search suggested that print and web media outlets similarly produced near saturation coverage during the past week. There were multiple front-page stories on the Washington Post, USA today, and almost every paper we could get our hands on. Virtually all of these stories used images from the SOHO spacecraft as well as animation and graphics provided by the Sun-Earth Connection Media Visualization Project.

By in large, media coverage of this huge solar event was more restrained and more accurate and than during some of our previous (and smaller) solar events.

Arctic Ice is Thinning

Last Friday's live media interviews with Headquarters' Waleed Abdalati about the recent Earth Science Update was also successful. The recent discoveries of the warming temperatures in the Arctic that can greatly affect the ocean processes was featured on the CBS Evening News, Early Show and about 25 local markets to an estimated 12-15 million viewers. The ESE News team were able to located almost 100 separate stories in newspapers across the country.

Southern California Fires

The MODIS and SeaWiFS sensors captured spectacular images of the fires plaguing southern California. The images released via the web and NASA received tremendous in newscasts and seemed to be in almost every newspaper we looked at. The images were used in the New York Times, Washington Post, USA today just to name a few. On Monday and Tuesday, Google noted they were the most emailed news photos from both Reuters and Associated Press.

The MODIS fire channel data is now being incorporated into graphics and maps. Examples ran in the Los Angeles Times and the News York Times.