DISASTER!(NASA e-mails about global disasters)

In October, NASA started sending out daily e-mails about global disasters, serving, in effect, as an earth-sciences version of the Fox network. These "Natural Hazards Announce" bulletins contain links to satellite photos of the world's craziest wildfires, volcanoes, storms, and "dust and smoke events," as well as when-good-fossil-fuels-go-bad curios such as "Floundering Oil Tanker Off Rio de Janeiro."

More than three thousand inquisitive souls signed up for the service, which is free, and the images--ash from Sicily's Mt. Etna pluming up like molten toffee; Russia's Kolka Glacier plunging down Mt. Kazbek; the Black Sea gone turquoise from a huge plankton bloom--drew an immediate response. They have been used by CNN, the Associated Press, and the Washington Post. David Herring, who initiated the bulletins in his role as chief editor of NASA's "Earth Observatory" Web site, has been inundated with enthusiastic e-mails from around the world. Michael Benning, a German artist, wrote:

Hi Mr. Herring, Sir, Fantastic Service, Informativ, Breathtaking Pics, Great! Thanx a lot keeping up to date, with actual happenings of the "Blue Marble.", Grettings to you and your colleges.

Herring, a thirty-eight-year-old science writer, heads a team of five colleagues at Goddard Space Flight Center, in Greenbelt, Maryland, who hunt for vivid images amid the reams of data gathered by cameras and radiometers aboard satellites, the shuttle, and even the International Space Station. Here's how the world looks from their point of view, high in the troposphere:

[middle dot]Hurricanes make superb eye candy. Large, fierce, and whirling, NASA's hurricanes look the way hurricanes are supposed to look. A particular delight was a computer-generated image of Hurricane Kenna from the side. It showed a vast and implacable Art Deco wedding cake approaching the west coast of Mexico, its ten-mile-high clouds alight with screaming-yellow cascades of rain.

[middle dot]Forest fires in the United States rock. Because NASA shares some of its technologies with the U.S. Forest Service, ...