Mission Affiliation
Major Category
Alan Stahler of community radio KVMR in Nevada City, California interviews NASA Goddard's Owen Kelley about hurricane physics, how TRMM measures precipitation, and the TRMM overflight of Hurricane Sandy one day before landfall. The 38-minute-long interview aired on the anniversary of the TRMM satellite's launch.
Station: KVMR-FM, Nevada City, California
Host: Alan Stahler of the science program "Soundings"
Interviewee: Owen Kelley, Research Scientist, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt MD
Broadcast: Noon PST, Tuesday, 27 Nov 2012 (the day of the 15th anniversary of the launch of the TRMM satellite)
Duration: 38.5 minutes
Topics Overview:
- General discussion of instruments for measuring precipitation from space
- The instruments on the TRMM satellite
- Joanne Simpson: pioneer, scientist, leader, mentor
- Hot towers in the atmosphere's general circulation
- Latent heat
- Hot towers as building blocks of larger systems.
- Hot towers affecting larger systems.
- Detrimental and beneficial effects of wind shear
- Hurricane genesis
- The TRMM radar seeing precipitation offers clues to energy transformations
- Looking at the eyewall with the TRMM radar
- Joanne Simpson's "Hot Tower Hypothesis" re-examined:
- Hot towers as energy pipelines
- Convective bursts matter, not individual hot towers
- Destructive power increases rapidly with small wind speed increases
- The TRMM overflight of Hurricane Sandy (2012), the day before landfall in New Jersey
- GPM, the big brother of TRMM
- Lightning