John from New York: Will CALIPSO/CloudSat be able to track or predict a category 5 or any other type of hurricane?
Okay, well, CALIPSO and CloudSat are not weather-tracking satellites, per se.
But what CloudSat does is very, very important from the point of view of studying storms and hurricanes, for example,
is it gives us the first real inside view of the process by which the fuel of hurricanes is converted to energy.
The fuel for hurricanes comes from the warm ocean waters. But it's inside clouds that fuel gets converted to energy.
That's the energy that drives these storms.
CloudSat's going to give us the first internal view of that process by which the energy is created that drives these storms.