I am a recovery
TV meteorologist,
I guess you might say.
Coevolution might not be
the right perspective,
Nimbus evolved and then
TV weather evolved after that,
hanging onto may be the
antennas of the solar panels
or at least the data feed
as forecasters saw
the data coming down
and trying to figure out
that could really help us.
I started out in Seattle
and any help we
had in the 70s
was trying to figure
out what was coming in
from the Pacific would
have been a huge help,
and obviously very
important to us.
So coevolution,
and the thing I really want
to emphasize here is more,
the educational aspects
that the Nimbus program
has really provided us.
Okay, we advance here,
there we go!
So Informal Science Learning and
Public Awareness of Science,
I think really
has been enhanced
by the Nimbus projects
and the various projects
that have come out of
the Nimbus project.
I sort of found my
way here at NASA
as a result of trying to do a
story about the rescue system,
about seven
years ago or so,
and so that really sort of comes
from Nimbus tracking Reindeer
back in those early days.
Can we have volume
on this one?
No sound?
Anyway, this is
what TV looked like
before satellite imagery.
Look at the set.
This is right after Camille,
the Katrina of the 1960s,
there are no satellite loops,
no radar loops,
it's magnetic hurricane symbols
on a map, dials on the side.
Those are magnetic words,
you would spend an hour
putting up magnetic words
on a weather chart.
We evolved,
started out in Seattle,
I was particularly interested
in the early images.
I would go down to the
National Weather Service,
take a 4x5 Polaroid
of the latest satellite
over the Pacific,
mostly clouds all the
way from Seattle's Japan
and go back to the station
and show this little 4x5
image on the TV camera,
and kept hoping that we'd
see a clear spot sometime
between September and June
in Seattle, forget about it,
most of the time it was just
great cloudy skies all the way,
but sort of a
Rorschach inkblot test.
In the early days Rory Leep
was one of our real heroes.
He had a staff of
six TV meteorologists
and he had a 1966...
some of the first images,
but that receiver cost
his station $11,000.
That was above our
budget in Seattle,
and think, now the
quarter a million
that they spend on Doppler
Radar at the present time,
even by 1980, look how crude
the satellite imagery was.
We have come a long ways.
This is the Weather
Channel 1982,
I was fortunate enough
to do a pilot for this
about a year ahead of
their actual launch to see
that I can satellite
advertise it.
We were thinking in 1982,
who is going to
watch weather 24x7?
But look how crude it was.
There was the radar,
there was their set,
there was their map.
Even in 1982,
the satellite imagery
was just very minimal.
Let's take an example of
what we are going to
show now, sea ice.
We have now sea
ice in the can,
really from 1964 as I
understand it from Nimbus.
We are looking down on part
of the Arctic Ocean here.
I might be there somewhere
on T3, but maybe not,
but by 1983,
thanks to Nimbus-7,
we were able to really begin
to monitor the sea ice,
and look what I
can do now today
with letting the public know
about the science of the world.
We can... we do live shots
now out of NASA Goddard,
once a month basically
with morning TV forecasters
and we give them
two minutes or so
to ask questions
of our scientists,
whether it would be ozone
hole or Arctic sea ice,
and basically part of...
oh, there was a movie there,
can we play that?
Here we are.
Part of the informal science
education process is Show Me;
if you can show me,
I can tend to believe it
maybe a little quicker.
We can actually
take people now...
thanks to the imagery
that we have.
Let's start with the Nimbus
program to the Arctic
and show them,
it is melting.
We can show them elements
of the environment now
that we have never
clicked before
and we can also bring
it home in a sense
that the 'how' and the 'why'
of what's going on,
now that we know
about the three-dimensional
view of the earth
and the melting ice
and the open ocean,
changing the heat budget of
different areas of the world,
and perhaps affecting
the jet stream flow
and how that may
affect storms like
Sandy hitting the East Coast
or the polar vortex.
A very complicated process
but now we have a way.
My work really started out
about seven years ago
at George Mason Climate
Change Education
which is really earth
science education,
and the imagery and the data,
the database of the imagery,
we can show now with NASA and
NOAA data is really helpful.
In informal science education,
what works in museums,
zoos or aquariums;
aquarium I guess it is,
is the aha moment of science,
the fact, the concepts,
the method,
how do scientists do...
how do they propose
these theories,
and then number four,
science is a bunch of
people working together,
it's a social system which
sometimes goes wrong.
Nimbus B, crashes
into the ocean,
but we learned from
that and we go on.
Is TV news still important?
Yes, it's still the way most
people learned about science.
After 12 years of school,
what do we learn
about science?
We have probably
learned first on TV.
Our general model
at George Mason is
we have communication
practitioners,
the broadcast meteorologists
and then you have
the science experts
and then you have the
communication scientists,
those people who
understand how people,
really the psychology
or social science
of how people perceive risk
and why they take action
during tornadoes or hurricanes.
But the content experts
of course are key to this.
Here is our perfect
example of B,
Informal Science Education.
Science is not perfect.
It is a process, peer review,
goes back and forth
and through news reports.
Sometimes we can show people,
how human it is, right?
And there is the recovery
coming in from the ocean.
Another example,
ocean temperatures;
this was the data coming
in from Nimbus...
well, this is
Nimbus-7 I think,
about ocean temperatures.
Look what we can do now.
Can we play this movie?
We can show height
plus or minus 7 inches,
I think it is on this side,
and then we've got Rossby
and Kelvin waves
on the other side.
See height and
temperature differences.
All this visualization now,
we can show people
and give them a sense of,
wow, this is a complicated
and very interesting world.
We can show the
world solidity.
Who would have thought?
With the satellites that
have evolved out of Nimbus
that we can show;
and Paul will talk
more about this,
I am sure, the ozone hole,
the fact that we could
show them the early days,
there is a hole,
something is missing.
People can sense that.
They can get it...
and now look at the data,
all the kinds of data
that we can show them
and we can even do
it on our iPhone.
I can take people and say,
hey, let's look at...
sea surface height around
the world and I can make,
it's in your pocket,
all this coming in from
people who were here at NASA,
thinking there is data that
we can get via satellite.
Look at the wonderful
informal science education...
and do we have
sound here, or not?
-Not at all?
-No.
Okay, this is too bad
because Mike uses an iPad
to show his folks
wonderful science,
often as NASA science,
and he makes a point
at the end of this,
here is some wonderful science
education and also inspiration.
I couldn't have written
those words better for him
the way he said it.
But that's a legacy I think
of what the Nimbus engineers,
scientists, meteorologists,
infrared experts,
all of you have done
and so on behalf of the many,
many weather forecasters,
I would like to give
you a big thanks
for doing all the work
that you have done.
It's really exciting,
and look where we are now,
we can see it all on our
iPhone, on our iPad,
so thank you very much!