More About the Project

Scientists at DEA use satellite data to track environmental change over time, and they employ complex algorithms to filter clouds from the data to obtain a clear picture of the Earth. The result of this filtering is a vast archive of “invalid data” – a 40-year record of the incredible cloud formations that daily spread across the continent. 

“Path 99” inverts the DEA algorithms to show invalid data only, and as a result, the life of the continent opens up in an entirely new way; we see not the land but what floats up above it, what protects it from solar radiation, what insulates and cocoons us, what distributes water and life and mineral content across the planet; the cloud layer.

This project examines the cloud layer of Australia down Path 99, an orbit of the NASA/USGS Landsat 8 satellite that passes directly down the centre of the country. Every 16 days, in a single pass lasting only seven and a half minutes, the satellite scans the state of the continent from tropical Aurukun and the Gulf of Carpentaria in the North, down through the arid deserts, dune systems and salt lakes of Central Australia, across the Eyre Peninsula and out into the Southern Ocean.

This project uses data from 9 sites down path 99, over 7 years from 2013 until the end of 2019. It is underpinned by a vast database of images and, through correlating the images with data made available by the USGS and NASA who manage the Landsat 8 satellite, we can also gather the average “cloudiness” measurements for these sites.

The images arising from this process give insight into the vast array of weather systems that span the continent – and, when animated and presented over time in time-lapse, show us the changing and vastly divergent fortunes of the country, the coming and the going of cloud, storm and rain, periods of drought and of deluge.

What’s really interesting is that the project in fact operates as a kind of pre-history of the catastrophic Australian bushfire season of 2019-20. This is what we see in the data, where cloudiness values plummet in 2019, Australia’s hottest and driest year on record.

Simultaneously algorithmic, computational and photographic, the images in this project are also rendered using Near Infrared and Shortwave Infrared light, enabling a dramatic colour space that separates cloud layers and types and foregrounds atmospheric textures and phenomena invisible to the human eye. Combining the visual immersion of fulldome planetarium projection with a multi-channel electronic soundtrack, this project is a unique combination art, science and the Earth.