Michelle Thaller Live Shot Q&A

Narration:

Transcript:

[Michelle Thaller] Well that's right, it's a very exciting day at Goddard Space Flight Center today. We're inagurating a wonderful new computer center that's specialty is climate and weather. It's a 15,000 processor supercomputer. It's capable of doing 160 trillion of calculations per second. And certainly one of my favorite bits is our visualization wall. This is actually 15 high definition LCD screens all put together working as one. And you're looking a 14 million pixel display. So it's one thing to have the numbers, but to actually watch the simulations run before you, that makes us better scientists. Well you can imagine what a complicated thing the weather really is. Everything is affecting everything else at the same time. Temperature affecting pressure affecting humidity. So we break the atmosphere down into manageable chunks. into a grid. And by having all of these grids together, and some of our models are only a few kilometers across. We take all of these numbers, we plug them into this amazing supercomputer and run how the entire interactive system is working at any given time. We can run it forwards, we can run it backwards, we can see if we did a good job predicting what happened in the past, and hopefully that'll give us a chance to see whether our models are real and give us confidence for what the future holds. Well one of the things that NASA has is a vast richness of satellite data; we have 30 years of observing the earth, all of that data. So we can plug the real observations into these models and watch the weather change, the climate unfold over a long period of time. Some of these simulations are going to run climate back as much as 1,000 years and run it forward as much as 100. So having this computational center here with all of this real-life data to make sure our models are telling us telling us the truth is going to wonderful view of the changing planet. Whenever you use a model you want to know that the model is based in reality, that you're actually doing something right. So looking at the past gives you that opportunity. You can look at what was happening, for example, in 2005. This is the hurricane season. It was a very active, violent hurricane season. Of course Hurricane Katrina was very famous. Did our models predict what really happened? They predict the paths of these hurricanes. This, for example, is a model of water vapor based on satellite observations. Hurricane Katrina as well, you see there form all of the water vapor and then it disperses over the country. By looking at the past, if the predictions were correct, that means that we had a good batting average and that means that hopefully our future performance will be the same. All of the things you've seen today and literally thousands of other illustrations, data sets, animations are available at our website. So please go to nasa.gov/goddard and download all of this. It's free, it's public. We really encourage you to go there and see what we've got.