The photo I chose for the banner of Liz’s Lab Notebook is from a
collection of some of the earliest satellite images of Earth.
It’s actually a photo of a photo (as in a photo that was
developed from a roll of film) that I took at the 2012 69th
Eastern Snow Conference held at the Frost Valley YMCA
Claryville, NY. The photo came courtesy of the keynote speaker
at the conference, Dr. David Robinson, Director of the Rutgers
University Global Snow Lab and the New Jersey State
Climatologist. The collection of early satellite images were
rescued from the NOAA trash bin by the late William Denn, a
retired navy officer who ran a sea ice consultant business in
the 1970′s and 1980′s. With newer, higher resolution satellite
images, NOAA had little use for the older mosaics. The satellite
images are more than just pretty photos. The photos mosaics are
important data records. As a graduate student and post-doc,
David and his colleagues would pour over the images with hand
lenses to distinguish snow-covered land from snow a