Our last question is from Junichi from Niihama-City.
What is the advantage of examining clouds vertically, comparing to examining clouds from a bird's-eye view?
Yeah, that’s a good question, Junichi. That's a -- the vertical structure of clouds is important to almost all the properties of clouds.
Clouds form by air being lifted. The stronger the lift, the deeper the cloud.
The deeper the cloud, the more likelihood of the precipitation being developed.
The deeper the cloud, the stronger the precipitation and more likelihood there is of severe hail, hail, for example, damaging hail.
But a vertical structure cloud really dictates a lot of the properties of clouds. And just as sort of an anecdotal story, you know,
one of the issues for launching CloudSat and CALIPSO is the conditions of cloudiness.
If cloud layers are too thick and they're in just the right part in the atmosphere, it represents a real problem for our launch vehicles.
We could have a situation where we have both water and ice in clouds, and that represents a problem, not only for launching a rocket,
but for aviation in general. So that's just an illustration how important it is to know where the
cloud is in the vertical and how thick the clouds are.
Thank you, Dr. Stephens, for joining us and educating us about CloudSat mission.
It's a pleasure.