WEBVTT 1 00:00:00.066 --> 00:00:05.699 2 00:00:05.700 --> 00:00:09.866 Today joining us to help us understand the science behind Earth's severe weather, 3 00:00:09.866 --> 00:00:12.366 we have Dr. Dalia Kirschbaum. Thank you for joining us today. 4 00:00:12.366 --> 00:00:12.399 5 00:00:12.400 --> 00:00:14.266 Thank you for having me. 6 00:00:14.266 --> 00:00:19.899 We are going to be discussing primarily a program you are very familiar with, the Global Precipitation Measurement Mission 7 00:00:19.900 --> 00:00:24.900 and how it helps us see weather around our planet Earth. So tell us a little bit more. 8 00:00:24.900 --> 00:00:30.333 That's right. So Earth is a really complex system and understanding how water, which is Earth's most precious resource 9 00:00:30.333 --> 00:00:37.033 moves from the atmosphere to the ground, to the underground is really important for understanding the global water cycle. 10 00:00:37.033 --> 00:00:45.966 Now, GPM looks at precipitation and it helps us to understand what's happening with rainfall, everything from light rain to heavy rain and snow 11 00:00:45.966 --> 00:00:51.266 all the way from the tropics to the poles. GPM is an international constellation of satellites, 12 00:00:51.266 --> 00:00:54.932 so what you see right here, it shows all of these different satellites 13 00:00:54.933 --> 00:01:00.866 orbiting in different places. They're from the U.S. and international agencies and they all work 14 00:01:00.866 --> 00:01:06.866 to provide a global picture of rain and snow everywhere around the world every 3 hours. 15 00:01:06.866 --> 00:01:10.666 Now, precipitation gives us a primary way to understand how weather behaves 16 00:01:10.666 --> 00:01:13.499 and how climate changes over time. 17 00:01:13.500 --> 00:01:16.833 And so really the difference between weather and climate, which is important to note, 18 00:01:16.833 --> 00:01:20.466 is that weather is sort of like our mood, how we feel on a day-to-day basis, 19 00:01:20.466 --> 00:01:22.432 whereas climate is like our personality over time. 20 00:01:22.433 --> 00:01:26.666 Sort of like: do we bring an umbrella today or do we bring it this season. 21 00:01:26.666 --> 00:01:30.232 And so what GPM and other NASA satellites are helping to understand 22 00:01:30.233 --> 00:01:36.066 is our global water cycle and precipitation is one of the ways, the key contributors to our reservoir in the sky. 23 00:01:36.066 --> 00:01:41.732 Excellent. Well today, we are going to take a closer look at three kinds of severe weather and their impacts. 24 00:01:41.733 --> 00:01:46.599 First off hurricanes, then floods and landslides, and finally we'll wrap up with snowstorms. 25 00:01:46.600 --> 00:01:51.466 So first let's take a look at hurricanes, something actually near and dear to my heart, because having lived in the 26 00:01:51.466 --> 00:01:56.999 Gulf Coast area for six years, I have had to either hunker down or evacuate for hurricanes before, 27 00:01:57.000 --> 00:01:59.033 but NASA looks at them in a whole new way. 28 00:01:59.033 --> 00:02:03.766 That's right. So hurricanes, they're like a heat engine. You need warm water, 29 00:02:03.766 --> 00:02:07.866 you need some preexisting storms, and some breezes to bring everything together. 30 00:02:07.866 --> 00:02:13.432 Now just so we know, hurricanes and typhoons, and cycloons - they're all the same phenomena, just in different basins. 31 00:02:13.433 --> 00:02:18.933 We actually just finished the Atlantic hurricane season yesterday, November 30, 32 00:02:18.933 --> 00:02:24.299 and we had a pretty light, pretty mild Atlantic hurricane season, and a pretty active Pacific season. 33 00:02:24.300 --> 00:02:29.433 Now, from the vantage point of space, you can see some of these major storms in ways that you can't see on the ground. 34 00:02:29.433 --> 00:02:34.599 The Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission, or TRMM, which came right before GPM, 35 00:02:34.600 --> 00:02:40.666 has been looking three dimensionally at hurricanes such as this, this is Hurricane Katrina, and it shows layer by layer 36 00:02:40.666 --> 00:02:46.532 through storms, these huge towers, which we call hot towers, and those are convective systems, 37 00:02:46.533 --> 00:02:51.666 convection within hurricanes that show when we might have a storm intensifying and where it might go. 38 00:02:51.666 --> 00:02:56.166 And so TRMM was the first one to look at these storms in 3-D. 39 00:02:56.166 --> 00:03:02.332 Now GPM is actually able to improve upon that, looking at everything from the tropics all the way to high latitudes. 40 00:03:02.333 --> 00:03:10.233 And so what we're able to see, this is a graphic of Hurricane Gonzalo, which affected the Atlantic, 41 00:03:10.233 --> 00:03:15.533 what you are looking at here is heavy precipitation in the reds and pinks and lighter in greens, 42 00:03:15.533 --> 00:03:20.833 and what GPM can see is also the blue, which is the snow and the ice on the top of the storm 43 00:03:20.833 --> 00:03:27.466 and looking at all of those together, really helps us to understand the dynamics of the storm, where it's going. 44 00:03:27.466 --> 00:03:32.032 One of the things that we haven't been able to do as of yet, before GPM, was look at 45 00:03:32.033 --> 00:03:37.399 storms like Hurricane Sandy for example. Now Hurricane Sandy affected the East Coast. 46 00:03:37.400 --> 00:03:44.133 This actually shows wind speeds and it shows the speeds - the red is really, really intense winds - and it shows it moving its way 47 00:03:44.133 --> 00:03:50.699 up the East Coast. Now GPM was just launched in February of this year, and before that, which is when Hurricane Sandy occurred, 48 00:03:50.700 --> 00:03:55.933 we wouldn't have known what the rainfall was like in this storm as it was off the coast. 49 00:03:55.933 --> 00:04:01.033 GPM can really allow us to have the global picture from the tropics all the ways to the poles. 50 00:04:01.033 --> 00:04:03.933 That's fantastic. So while TRMM is a wonderful program, wonderful mission, 51 00:04:03.933 --> 00:04:07.933 it's really limited because it's going around the equatorial region of our planet. 52 00:04:07.933 --> 00:04:12.466 While GPM is showing us the more global, as it says in the name, the more global view. 53 00:04:12.466 --> 00:04:13.199 That's right.