Ocean Color Image Gallery

Afro-Eurasia

This VIIRS composite shows a portion of Afro-Eurasia on July 2, 2019. Of the water bodies that are visible, the Black Sea (near the center) stands out because of its bright color. During the summer, the Black Sea often hosts large blooms of coccolithophores, and the little calcite plates that those phytoplankton produce are the most likely cause of the aquamarine hues that you see in this image.

The above image is a composite of data from 9 orbits of NOAA 20 collected over a span of 14 hours on July 2, 2019. Data from four orbits of Suomi-NPP collected on the same day were used to replace high-glint portions of the NOAA-20 data. Click on the above image to get a much larger (65 megabytes, 15,000 by 15,000 pixels) version.