Now, Deputy PI, Deborah Vane and Project Manager, Tom Livermore tell us how CloudSat will live up to its name.
CloudSat is a very unique mission. It is the very first time that we will be able to see inside of clouds from space.
I mean, we're all very familiar with what clouds look like from below,
and even on the weather programs at night, we see the clouds from above.
But until now, we haven't had the ability to actually look inside the clouds. And that's what CloudSat's going to do.
The first ever time to see inside of clouds to see how much water, how much ice are inside those clouds.
The reason it's important to study clouds is that they're a key component of our climate system and our weather system.
They fundamentally alter the amount of the sun's energy that reaches the surface, and they carry the fresh water.
They are the means by which the fresh water on this planet is recycled.
Ultimately, the information that we get from CloudSat provides promise in improving
weather predictions, significantly improving weather predictions.
That would include the promise of improving our forecasts of hurricane tracks.
And we will use CloudSat data in an experimental way to try out some of those, those promises.
CloudSat is a mission that has a single instrument on it and it looks directly down what we call a
nadir point down on the Earth and penetrates the clouds with its radar beam.
As the radar beam penetrates the clouds, part of it's reflected back. And by looking at that information,
we can determine the water content of the clouds as we go through a different layer of the cloud structure.
This is something that's never been done before in an Earth-orbiting mission or in any satellite mission.
And by so doing, we're going to greatly improve the ability to make short-term weather forecasts.
For instance, 48 hours out, we're going to be able to give a,
have much better knowledge about how much rainfall is going to fall and about exactly where that
rainfall is going to fall, as opposed to the capability we have today.
CloudSat and CALIPSO fly together in formation roughly 15 seconds separated along the same track,
and therefore that gives us the ability to look at the same set of clouds we track over.
Putting these two pieces of information together, that the two systems gather,
allows us to detect not only thin cirrus clouds and how much water content is then and what the heat transfer effect of that is,
but it also allows us to then through the cloud-profiling radar to look through thick clouds that
CALIPSO can't look through, and gather the water content of those clouds.
This is going to allow us to make much-improved prediction about the amount of
rainfall that comes out of these clouds over a much longer timeframe.