One of the things that's really interesting about snowflakes that not many people know is that
every single one of them has six sides. And that's the way
that the bonds, when they freeze, they actually
force the water to have a fixed side. Liquid
water can move all around, you know, you can pour it and stuff like that, but snow always has
six sides. As the snowflake grows, parts
form off the side depending on the temperature and the water that's
available within the atmospheric column. You start to get
different parts that come out of that snowflake. And you can get these
beautifully complex dendrites with just little
spikes off of them, and they are all from that hard binding
between the oxygen and the hydrogen within
the water itself as it freezes. It's important to be able to
improve these numerical weather predictions and their forecasts. Right
now they're slowly moving toward making the
snowflakes within these models more realistic. And GPM can do
that because we are able to measure layer-by-layer within the storm
and provide drop size distributions, not only of the rain
particles, but also the snowflakes within that storm.
And that allows us to put that information into
numerical weather prediction to have a better estimate of these types of storms
and where they're going to have the most impact on society.