Earth from Space - Image Description

STS066-158-097 Mississippi River Valley, Tennessee, U.S.A. November 1994
Visible in this northeast-looking photograph are Memphis, the largest city in southwest Tennessee (east of center); West Memphis on the west side of the Mississippi River in Arkansas; two major drainage features--dark, vegetated Wolf Creek and the Loosahatchie River Canal that pass through northern Memphis and drain into the Mississippi River north of the city; and in Mississippi the Arkabutla Reservoir south of Memphis and Sardis Lake (lower right corner). The runways of Memphis International Airport are barely visible south of the urban area. The darker, eastern half of the photograph depicts an elevated, rolling terrain separated from the flat, broad floodplain by a steep escarpment that results in the linear, east-west color change between the two landforms. Apparent are extensive agriculture patterns on the floodplain; meander scars; dark, wooded bottom land that follows entrenched streambeds; thin, dark levees that have been constructed to prevent flooding on some of the floodplain; and white sandbars within the main channel of the Mississippi River.

This service is provided by the International Space Station program and the JSC Earth Science & Remote Sensing Unit, ARES Division, Exploration Integration Science Directorate.