A land south of India?

The image below was captured earlier today from the EQS-G1 (formerly GOES 13) weather satellite. Looking closely there is what looks to be a large area of land, highlighted by the yellow box, south of India. There is clearly a mixture of brown and green land.

However checking any physical atlas or online map and you’ll not see an area of land which is of a size which is comparable to the area of India. And it isn’t Australia which is just visible to the right of the yellow box.

So what are we seeing? Is this really land which isn’t on any map? Is this something for the conspiracy theorists to get all excited about?

Of course not, what we’re seeing isn’t land. It is the reflection of the sun off the Indian Ocean. However this doesn’t seem to make sense as “everybody knows that the sun is yellow”. But then people are only used to looking at the sun from the surface of the earth and seeing a yellow sun or a red one near sunset. But jump into space, outside the earth’s atmosphere and you’ll see that our sun is actually white.

The reason it looks yellow / red is that the white light from the sun is being scattered by the atmosphere. Blue light is scattered the most, which is why the sky is blue and light towards the yellow / red part of the spectrum is scattered the least.

Jumping to the science, this is covered by Rayleigh’s Law which shows that the scattering is proportional to the reciprocal of the fourth power of the wavelength of the light.

So how does this explain the “land” south of India? The image was captured at 06:15 UTC, which is close to noon in India (India Standard Time). So the sun is approximately overhead, so the pattern aligns with it being the reflection of the sun. However it is showing as being significantly south of the equator. But note the date, which is just a few days after the southern summer solstice, hence the sun aligning with the Tropic of Capricorn, which is south of the equator.

The colouration has a yellow / brown centre, from light which is scattered only a small amount, surrounded by a green area which is scattered more. Around it will be blue scattered light, however this will blend into the colour of the ocean which is also blue.

So the atlases and online maps are accurate and there is no hidden land to be found.

And if you need more evidence, watch this video which shows the last three days images from GOES 13. You’ll see the reflection track across the images.