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Gail: Actually the snow right now is not abnormal right now. What we're seeing

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over the past couple of years is that snow can vary from month to month

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and over the past few winters, yeah, we've seen a lot of snow, but this year, there's not much

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snow, but it's not by far the least amount of snow that we've had.

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2006 had less snow. and as we would recall in 2010 we had

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quite a bit of snow. So it's really not abnormal; it's just the global cycle working

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together.

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There's lots of impacts for not having enough snow. Snow is quite an

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important part of the water cycle. When snow falls it lands on snowpacks, and it's

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stays there. It's like a battery and it holds the energy of that snow

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it holds that water. So that when it melts out in the spring and the summer, we can use that

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for water resources. If we get less snow, that means that it melts earlier

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and also there's an issue with if it melts,

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it means that the Earth, which is typically reflective when there's snow cover; it's like a

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mirror, it allows it to absorb more heat. So we really want to have as much snow as

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we can for our normal cycles.

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Yeah, there were a couple factors

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that NASA researchers have recently uncovered. One of th

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big things for the Snowmageddon in 2010 is that we were in an El Nino

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year, and what that means is that there's a lot of moisture from the

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Pacific Ocean was uplifted and brought over the U.S. And what happened

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there, then it's deposited in the southeast U.S.

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came up the east coast. And then what we had was another factor, which was

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called the North Atlantic Oscillation, and in 2010 it was persistently

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negative. And really what that means is that there was a high pressure system over the polar

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regions that was pushing cold air down. So the interacting moisture for

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the Pacific Ocean with the cold air from the Arctic, what happens then is

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we get snow, and we got a lot of snow in 2010.

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There's many reasons to study

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snow from space. Sure, you can go in your backyard or use your radar

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to measure it from space. But over the oceans there's

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no way to measure the snow. When you measure snow from space you can get uniform

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measurements that can be applied globally and also can be used

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in models for better forecasting for weather and for better forecasting

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of the climate change and how we are going to predict climate change.

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NASA is doing some great things right now to understand winter storm mechanics.

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We have a field campaign going on right now which is in the January

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time period of 2012. We've got an aircraft called the DC-8, which many of you

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might have flown on, and I was actually on last week. And this aircraft is flying

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over the tops of the snow clouds over southern Ontario. And with it we're also

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measuring some other information with other spiralling aircraft, and we've

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put all this information together to get a three-dimensional structure of the snow.

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We're going to use that for Global Precipitation Measurement, which is a satellite

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that's going to be launched in 2014. And this satellite is going to provide us everything

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from the heavy tropical rain you might see in hurricanes all the way through the snow.

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And the information we're getting right now is going to help improve those models

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and to help improve our forecasting in the future.

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