[Music, rain]
[rain] Dalia: GPM will help us to understand
precipitation extremes. And this is everything from too much rainfall, such as
flooding in India or Southeast Asia, to too little rainfall
such as drought in the U.S. Southwest.
[music]
Eric: There's about one major flood a day
someplace in the world, so it's not as if it's a rare event.
[rain falling, thunder]
Big problem is that over much of the world
the in situ data, the gauges, and the measured
precipitation just isn't available.
To predict floods you need to have the data in near real-time.
And so the satellites are
about the only way--GPM is about the only way--
that this is going to happen. And so we're going to use GPM
rainfall retrievals to go do analyses, do flood forecasting,
and bring climate services,
bring information, to users in these areas.
[music] Dalia: Landslides happen all over the world
in nearly every country, and they cause more economic damage and more fatalities than
people generally think. [rocks falling] The large
majority of landslides around the world are triggered by intense or prolonged rainfall.
[rain falling] A landslide is a general
term, often used for mudslides, debris flows, rock falls,
and usually it's just a mass of rock, earth, and dirt
basically moving down a hillslope. Typical
landslide studies are done at the local scale and they use gauge data. Now this is a problem
in areas of topography where we don't have gauges or radar, in particular
in developing areas where we don't have any information. So satellite data
is really important for understanding where and when this intense rainfall might happen
that could trigger landslides.
[music]
Tom: In the western U.S.
we deal with drought on a regular basis. It tends to be cyclic.
We'll get two or three dry years and we'll get a few wet years. If somebody
could predict when the dry ones are coming, we'd be a lot better off.
A lot of our water here comes in snow
It accumulates up in the mountains in the wintertime, runs off
in the spring, and that's we use for irrigation in the western U.S.
Wade: Agricultural drought is defined as a lack of
water within the top meter of soil
for adequate crop functionalities, adequate
crop productivity.
And if you're talking about agricultural drought,
probably the biggest error source is the quality of
the precipitation information that you have available. If you have good precipitation
information, you can do a very good job of characterizing drought and often its
subsequent impact on agricultural productivity.
Tom: We do work in research in
determining the water needs of crops and what the impacts on crops are
if you don't have enough water. We're doing this because we
realize that in the western U.S. there will likely be less water available
in the future than there has been in the past, and the farmers need to know how
to respond to that decreasing water supply.
Certainly when we're looking nationwide, the better prediction we have of how much
rain we've been getting and how much is likely to come in the near future
is very, very important. To the extent that we can predict that with satellites,
it's really beneficial.
This isn't just a U.S. problem; it's a global problem.
Many countries of the world are facing the same kind of issues
that we are. And so we expect this information to be able to be used
in the east and the western U.S. and globally. Dalia: We
need accurate and timely rainfall information to understand disasters like
floods, droughts, and landslides. GPM's global
rainfall data will help us to better understand and model these types of disasters
around the world. [Music, whoosh]
[Music]