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[Dr. Gail Skofronick-Jackson] Understanding how much snow is falling is important for many different areas
including transportation, safety, how much freshwater falls in a stored in snowpack
and is used later for freshwater resources.
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[Walt Peterson] The aircraft provide us with direct measurements of particle types and sizes
as the aircraft is flying through the clouds. They're actually looking at the
individual precipitation particles with probes on the airplanes. And we can
relate those measurements to what we see with the radar on the ground and it
helps us interpret everything about that column of water that the satellite is
going to be looking at.
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[Dr. Gail Skofronick-Jackson] Measuring precipitation globally is important because it provides a complete
picture of the global water cycle. GPM is going to be able to do that but it's
also going to be able to provide the local regional, regional scale. So that we
can get better information for oncoming droughts, potential landslides, potential
floods.
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[Walt Peterson] So the science benefit is that we're going to make these great accurate
measurements of precipitation. Essentially GPM will track water that
exists in the reservoir in the sky to the reservoir on the grounds. Okay so
that enables to, enables us to basically monitor the water resource as it
originates in the atmosphere and falls to the ground. That's a very important
scientific thing to be able to do because that information is used in all
kinds of different applications weather forecasting, climate studies. From a
scientific perspective making those measurements frequently and accurately
is really important.
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[Dr. Gail Skofronick-Jackson] The GPM core with its ability to detect falling snows, it's one of the very first
times that we've put sensors in space to specifically look at falling snow. And
we're we're at that edge where rain was 50 years ago.
So we're, we're still figuring out how to measure snow. Snow is it's much more
difficult than rain. Rain tends to be spherical like drops, but if you've ever
been out in a snow fall event and you've looked at your shirt you see that snow
comes in all different forms. And the sensors in space are actually sensitive
to those shapes. And we're still trying to figure out all of that. And the GPM
core with its additional frequencies and information on the sensors is going to
be able to provide us for the first time a lot more information about falling
snow.