There's nothing like taking a big breath of fresh air.

But even if the air you breathe looks and feels perfectly clean, it's not.

That's because tiny liquid droplets and solid particles known as aerosols populate the air we breathe on planet earth.

Sounds, gross, right?

But when you take a world view of all the aerosols in the air, as NASA has done in the images above and below, all those aerosols turn into something that's actually quite beautiful.

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^{Image Credit: NASA Earth Observatory images by Joshua Stevens, using GEOS data from the Global Modeling and Assimilation Office at NASA GSFC.}

The breathtaking photo of earth above, for example, shows how the earth's atmosphere looked on August 23, 2018.

The blue, purple, and red clouds represent different aerosols in the air, with blue representing sea salt, red representing black carbon, and purple representing dust.

As you look at the image, you can see patterns emerge in the way the colors are formed, which indicate climatic events on earth's surface, like hurricanes (as indicated by the tight formation of blue tones), wildfires (as indicated by the red tones), and dust storms (as indicated by the purple tones).

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^{Image Credit: NASA Earth Observatory images by Joshua Stevens, using GEOS data from the Global Modeling and Assimilation Office at NASA GSFC.}

Obviously, these aerosols aren't actually colored blue, red, and purple, but using false color imaging like this helps NASA figure out what's going on down here on the earth's surface.

And boy, was August 23rd an active day...

There's no less than hundreds of wildfires, one hurricane, two typhoons, and a few dust storms showing us earthlings what they're made of.

And while some of these elements are incredibly dangerous and have unfortunately taken lives and caused immense damage, from up above and with NASA's false color magic, earth's tumultuous weather sure does have an elegant and beautiful look to it.

To learn more about how NASA obtained these images, visit the NASA Earth Observatory website.

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Via NASA Earth Observatory and KFOR

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