The pinkish color of Lake Bumbunga in South Australia is evident in this cloud-free Harmonized Landsat and Sentinel-2 (HLS) image acquired on January 20, 2024. Located approximately 125 km (78 mi) from the South Australian state capital city, Adelaide, the pink color of this 15 km2 (5.8 mi2) salt lake is due to a type of algae that tolerates the high salinity and produces a pink pigment. The color changes seasonally and may appear more pink in spring than in winter due to higher concentrations of fresh water and more sunlight. Water in Lake Bumbunga generally evaporates in the dry summer leaving salt deposits. Prior to 2000, the lake was the location of a large salt harvesting operation. Today, the lake is a popular tourist destination. Explore Lake Bumbunga in NASA Worldview.
The HLS project provides 30-meter resolution, true-color surface reflectance imagery from the Operational Land Imager (OLI) and OLI-2 instruments aboard the joint NASA/USGS Landsat 8 and Landsat 9 satellites and the MultiSpectral Instrument (MSI) aboard the ESA (European Space Agency) Sentinel-2A and -2B satellites. Data processing—including atmospheric correction, cloud and cloud-shadow masking, spatial co-registration and common gridding, illumination and view angle normalization, and spectral bandpass adjustment—makes the imagery consistent and comparable across the instruments.
Visit Worldview to visualize near real-time imagery from NASA's EOSDIS, and check out more Worldview weekly images in our archive.
Dataset: doi:10.5067/HLS/HLSL30.002
