This is stunning stuff, but it actually took me a while to figure out what I was actually seeing. The size and scope of the image is so huge, I didn't even see the islands at first. (The colors are amazing, as well, though they didn't really jump out at me at first glance, either. Kind of like the things they're coloring, actually.)
Areas near the equator are frequently cloudy, obscuring the view of Earth’s surface from space. April 7, 2017, was no different. On that day, the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite captured this natural-color image of clouds over the Gilbert Islands. The remote island chain is part of the Republic of Kiribati, and straddles the equator in the central Pacific Ocean.
These clouds, however, were not your typical tropical rainstorm. Instead, the parallel “roll clouds” were likely influenced by the development of Tropical Cyclone Cook to the south. At the time, Cook was strengthening near Vanuatu and heading toward New Caledonia.
Attribution(s): "Clouds 'Roll' Over Pacific Atolls" comes from Jeff Schmaltz (LANCE/EOSDIS Rapid Response); all such content from NASA -- images, audio, video, and computer files used in the rendition of 3-dimensional models, such as texture maps and polygon data in any format -- generally are not copyrighted and may be used for educational or informational purposes, including photo collections, textbooks, public exhibits, computer graphical simulations and Internet Web pages. This general permission extends to personal Web pages.