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And you know some people have already experienced tremendous snowfalls,

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like Buffalo, New York had five to six feet at the beginning of November.

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In the last 10 years scientists have really shown that we are able to look at snowfall, at falling snow and snow pack, in ways we haven't

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been able to do before. In fact the project scientist, the lead of GPM, Dr. Gail Skofronick Jackson said that we are where

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we were measuring rain like this forty years ago, but only just starting with snowfall.

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So snow is an important primary resource of fresh water in mountain regions.

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For example the snowpack in the Sierra Nevadas accounts for one-third of the water supply for all of California.

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As the snow melt enters the water cycle, it provides both drinking water and sources for irrigation.

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Now with droughts and with climate change, that snowpack is actually starting to shrink and so water resource managers are very concerned

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about trying to find exactly where and when we're going to have these fresh water surges or fresh water deficits.

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Now snowflakes themselves come in a wide variety of different shapes and sizes. And with GPM, as I said before, the ability to look three

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dimensionally through the clouds allows us to look at individual snowflakes through time.

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So one way is to basically get all of the information scattered back from the particles, from snowfall, to really understand

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where we're having light rain, where we're having heavy rain. So what you're seeing here is all the

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different channels GPM can sense types of snow at, from light rain to heavy rain and ice.

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And the reason that's important is because knowing if something is light rain or if it's snow or if it's ice within the particles

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tells us a lot about the atmospheric circulation and storms in general

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and helps us to really modify our models to look at stronger or heavier rain events. In a changing climate that's really important.