Gail: Actually the snow right now is not abnormal right now. What we're seeing
over the past couple of years is that snow can vary from month to month
and over the past few winters, yeah, we've seen a lot of snow, but this year, there's not much
snow, but it's not by far the least amount of snow that we've had.
2006 had less snow, and as we would recall in 2010 we had
quite a bit of snow. So it's really not abnormal; it's just the global cycle working
together.
There's lots of impacts for not having enough snow. Snow is quite an
important part of the water cycle. When snow falls it lands on snowpacks, and it's
stays there. It's like a battery and it holds the energy of that snow
it holds that water. So that when it melts out in the spring and the summer, we can use that
for water resources. If we get less snow, that means that it melts earlier
and also there's an issue with if it melts,
it means that the Earth, which is typically reflective when there's snow cover; it's like a
mirror, it allows it to absorb more heat. So we really want to have as much snow as
we can for our normal cycles.
Yeah, there were a couple factors
that NASA researchers have recently uncovered. One of th
big things for the Snowmageddon in 2010 is that we were in an El Nino
year, and what that means is that there's a lot of moisture from the
Pacific Ocean was uplifted and brought over the U.S. And what happened
there, then it's deposited in the southeast U.S.
came up the east coast. And then what we had was another factor, which was
called the North Atlantic Oscillation, and in 2010 it was persistently
negative. And really what that means is that there was a high pressure system over the polar
regions that was pushing cold air down. So the interacting moisture for
the Pacific Ocean with the cold air from the Arctic, what happens then is
we get snow, and we got a lot of snow in 2010.
There's many reasons to study
snow from space. Sure, you can go in your backyard or use your radar
to measure it from space. But over the oceans there's
no way to measure the snow. When you measure snow from space you can get uniform
measurements that can be applied globally and also can be used
in models for better forecasting for weather and for better forecasting
of the climate change and how we are going to predict climate change.
NASA is doing some great things right now to understand winter storm mechanics.
We have a field campaign going on right now which is in the January
time period of 2012. We've got an aircraft called the DC-8, which many of you
might have flown on, and I was actually on last week. And this aircraft is flying
over the tops of the snow clouds over southern Ontario. And with it we're also
measuring some other information with other spiralling aircraft, and we've
put all this information together to get a three-dimensional structure of the snow.
We're going to use that for Global Precipitation Measurement, which is a satellite
that's going to be launched in 2014. And this satellite is going to provide us everything
from the heavy tropical rain you might see in hurricanes all the way through the snow.
And the information we're getting right now is going to help improve those models
and to help improve our forecasting in the future.
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