The combination of science, engineering and artistry was generated by using data from three different Earth-observing satellite instruments.

The prominent storm raging off the west coast of North America is Hurricane Linda. Other obvious features include the shallow waters of the Caribbean and sediments around the mouth of the Amazon River.

The underlying image of the full disk of Earth and its clouds was taken on September 9, 1997, by a Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES) operated by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and built by NASA. The ocean color data was collected in late September and early October 1997 by NASA’s Sea-viewing Wide Field-of-view Sensor (SeaWiFS) satellite. The land color is portrayed by a vegetation index calculated using data collected from September 9-19, 1997, by Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) instruments carried aboard NOAA’s Polar Orbiting Environmental Satellites (POES).

These data are draped across a digital elevation model of Earth’s topography from the U.S. Geological Survey.