Fantastic Finds from My Corner

by Elizabeth Pass, Cohort VI
for the June 2023 issue of Headwaters Highlights

Happy June and welcome in summer!

In my ramblings around the internet, I found a fascinating site you may be interested in. I know it’s become a rabbit hole for me!

TEMPO (Tropospheric Emissions: Monitoring of Pollution) is a UV-visible spectrometer instrument, the first space-based instrument to monitor air pollutants hourly during the day across North America. A Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory (SAO)/NASA venture, TEMPO will “…collect high-resolution measurements of ozone, nitrogen dioxide, and other pollutants….” Under the link TEMPO Project, Data, there are a couple of options/links to view the recent data from TEMPO. Be sure to check it out and see how the Valley is doing! If you are interested in keeping up with the TEMPO Project, be sure to join the TEMPO Early Adopters Community Mailing List. You will need to get a NASA Earthdata account to sign up for the newsletter.

*Image from the TEMPO website accessed May 2023*

Even better, because you got a NASA Earthdata account to sign up for the TEMPO Early Adopters Community Mailing newsletter, you get access to all of NASA’s collection of Earth science data. The areas you can spend hours and hours in rabbit holes are many:

Atmosphere
Biosphere
Cryosphere
Human Dimensions
Land Surface
Ocean
Solid Earth
Sun-Earth Interactions
Terrestrial Hydrosphere

I’ve also found some fiction and non-fiction reading you may enjoy as we settle into summer.

Fiction

Demon Copperfield, Barbara Kingsolver, 2022 – If you enjoyed David Copperfield by Charles Dickens or never had a chance to read it, you will most likely enjoy this novel, winner of the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. That’s because Dickens’s novel is the inspiration for Demon Copperfield, set in the southern Appalachia mountains and about a boy being raised by a single, poor, teen-aged mom.

The Lost Journals of Sacajewea: A Novel, Debra Magpie Earling, 2023 – Finally, the story of Sacajewea from an Indigenous woman’s point of view. This multi-awarded novel imagines Sacajewea’s story, giving her voice to her own history. Powerful and beautifully written.

Non-Fiction

Flight Paths: How a Passionate and Quirky Group of Pioneering Scientists Solved the Mystery of Bird Migration, Rebecca Heisman, 2023

Read the fascinating story of the scientists who discovered the secrets to bird migration and how they did it.

Below the Edge of Darkness: A Memoir of Exploring Light and Life in the Deep Sea, Edith Widder, Ph.D., 2021

This stunning memoir is all at once many things: the telling of an amazing life story, the discoveries of frontier exploration in the deep ocean, the illustrations of never-told marine behaviors and animals, and the revelations of communication through marine bioluminescence.