Denver, CO

Denver, Colorado reached 96 degrees Fahrenheit on July 8th, 2022. In the two days following, temperatures rose to 101 degrees Fahrenheit. For cities like Denver, heat dissipates more slowly and create urban heat islands. High temperatures due to urban heat, especially at night, can lead to adverse health effects in vulnerable populations like children and the elderly. This image also shows that bodies of water, like Barr Lake, remain warm into the night due to water's high heat capacity. ECOSTRESS captured this Land Surface Temperature image on July 8th, 2022 at 11:54 PM MDT.

ECOSTRESS is a thermal instrument on the International Space Station that measures the temperature of the ground, which is hotter than the air temperature during the day. It was launched to the space station in 2018. Its primary mission is to identify critical thresholds of water use and water stress in plants and to detect the timing, location, and predictive factors leading to plant water uptake decline and/or cessation. The nature of the high-resolution data provided by ECOSTRESS allows it to record heat related phenomena such as heat waves and wildfires.

The ECOSTRESS mission launched to the International Space Station on June 29, 2018. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of Caltech in Pasadena, California, built and manages the mission for the Earth Science Division in the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington. ECOSTRESS is an Earth Venture Instrument mission; the program is managed by NASA's Earth System Science Pathfinder program at NASA's Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia.

More information about ECOSTRESS is available here: https://ecostress.jpl.nasa.gov/.

For information on Earth science activities aboard the International Space Station, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/issearthscience.