As Hurricane Joaquin nears the East Coast, NASA scientists are keeping
a close eye on the storm and here to tell us more about what NASA is seeing
is Dr. Scott Braun from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. Thanks for joining us.
Happy to be here. [off camera] Start by telling us. You have a new 3D
view of Hurricane Joaquin. What are you seeing?
Well the Global Precipitation Measurement mission launched in February 2014
and it's carrying some very sophisticated instruments.
One of which gives us a 3D view of storms
measuring rain and snow layer by layer throughout the storm to give us
essentually a CAT scan of the storm. Now here we're taking a look at Joaquin when
it was just a strong tropical storm near the Bahamas and
the yellow and green colors represent
heavy precipitation near the surface. The blue colors represent snow and ice
spreading out near the top of the storm and in fact at this time was spreading out over the center of the storm
And from this type of information we can get
some insight as to how the storm is behaving and how it may potentially
change in the near future.
[off camera] Now tell us what's causing Hurricane Joaquin to intensify into a stronger storm?
Well Joaquin has been sitting over very warm waters
in the Bahamas and that provides the energy source for the hurricane.
Several days ago the environmental winds were fairly unfavorable for
developements, it was only slowly intensifying. But as those winds relaxed
the storm was in a much more favorable environment and was able to very quickly
up into a category 4 hurricane.
[off camera] The East Coast has already experienced heavy rainfall from a stalled weather system
what can we expect as Hurricane Joaquin moves northward?
The ground along much of the East Coast is already fairly saturated from a number of frontal systems
that we've had over the last week or so. The GPM constellation
of satellites is able to give us measurements of rainfall accumulation
not only over land, but over the ocean and you can you see
in this animation how you've got this heavy rainfall along the East Coast as well as
heavy rainfall associated with Joaquin near the Bahamas.
Now Joaquin is expected to move northward and predominantly stay off shore
so we're hoping that the U.S. will be relatively spared from
this system. But information from GPM can help us really
learn a lot about how hurricanes form and intensify.
That's really one of the key goals of NASA is to better understand
basic dynamics of these types of storms.
[off camera] How will forecasters and emergency managers use this information?"
Forecasters and emergency managers can make use of this information that's available
within six hours or so of the observation time.
With these global views of precipitation we can see
storms across the globe. But in the case of Joaquin here we're able to
zoom in on the U.S. region and the see
the frontal systems over the East Coast, Joaquin around the Bahamas, and they can
extract that information and how it's changing to assess the impacts of the storms
and the potential for flooding. [off camera] Where can we learn more?
You can learn more about GPM from www.nasa.gov/gpm
and on Twitter at NASA underscore rain.