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One of the things that's really interesting about snowflakes that not many people know is that

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every single one of them has six sides. And that's the way

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that the bonds, when they freeze, they actually

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force the water to have a fixed side. Liquid

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water can move all around, you know, you can pour it and stuff like that, but snow always has

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six sides. As the snowflake grows, parts

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form off the side depending on the temperature and the water that's

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available within the atmospheric column. You start to get

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different parts that come out of that snowflake. And you can get these

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beautifully complex dendrites with just little

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spikes off of them, and they are all from that hard binding

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between the oxygen and the hydrogen within

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the water itself as it freezes. It's important to be able to

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improve these numerical weather predictions and their forecasts. Right

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now they're slowly moving toward making the

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snowflakes within these models more realistic. And GPM can do

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that because we are able to measure layer-by-layer within the storm

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and provide drop size distributions, not only of the rain

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particles, but also the snowflakes within that storm.

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And that allows us to put that information into

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numerical weather prediction to have a better estimate of these types of storms

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and where they're going to have the most impact on society.

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