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[Music, rain]

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[rain]
Dalia: GPM will help us to understand

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precipitation extremes. And this is everything from too much rainfall, such as

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flooding in India or Southeast Asia, to too little rainfall

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such as drought in the U.S. Southwest.

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[music]

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Eric: There's about one major flood a day

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someplace in the world, so it's not as if it's a rare event.

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[rain falling, thunder]


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[rain falling, thunder]
Big problem is that over much of the world

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the in situ data, the gauges, and the measured

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precipitation just isn't available.

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To predict floods you need to have the data in near real-time.

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And so the satellites are

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about the only way--GPM is about the only way--

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that this is going to happen. And so we're going to use GPM

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rainfall retrievals to go do analyses, do flood forecasting,

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and bring climate services,

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bring information, to users in these areas.

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[music]
Dalia: Landslides happen all over the world

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in nearly every country, and they cause more economic damage and more fatalities than

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people generally think. [rocks falling] The large

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majority of landslides around the world are triggered by intense or prolonged rainfall.

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[rain falling]
A landslide is a general

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term, often used for mudslides, debris flows, rock falls,

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and usually it's just a mass of rock, earth, and dirt

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basically moving down a hillslope. Typical

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landslide studies are done at the local scale and they use gauge data. Now this is a problem

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in areas of topography where we don't have gauges or radar, in particular

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in developing areas where we don't have any information. So satellite data

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is really important for understanding where and when this intense rainfall might happen

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that could trigger landslides.

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[music]

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[music]

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[music]
Tom: In the western U.S.

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we deal with drought on a regular basis. It tends to be cyclic.

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We'll get two or three dry years and we'll get a few wet years. If somebody

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could predict when the dry ones are coming, we'd be a lot better off.

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A lot of our water here comes in snow

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It accumulates up in the mountains in the wintertime, runs off

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in the spring, and that's we use for irrigation in the western U.S.

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Wade: Agricultural drought is defined as a lack of

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water within the top meter of soil

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for adequate crop functionalities, adequate

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crop productivity.

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And if you're talking about agricultural drought, 

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probably the biggest error source is the quality of

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the precipitation information that you have available. If you have good precipitation

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information, you can do a very good job of characterizing drought and often its

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subsequent impact on agricultural productivity.

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Tom: We do work in research in

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determining the water needs of crops and what the impacts on crops are

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if you don't have enough water. We're doing this because we

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realize that in the western U.S. there will likely be less water available

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in the future than there has been in the past, and the farmers need to know how

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to respond to that decreasing water supply.

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Certainly when we're looking nationwide, the better prediction we have of how much

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rain we've been getting and how much is likely to come in the near future

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is very, very important. To the extent that we can predict that with satellites,

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it's really beneficial.

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This isn't just a U.S. problem; it's a global problem.

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Many countries of the world are facing the same kind of issues

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that we are. And so we expect this information to be able to be used

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in the east and the western U.S. and globally.
Dalia: We

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need accurate and timely rainfall information to understand disasters like

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floods, droughts, and landslides. GPM's global

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rainfall data will help us to better understand and model these types of disasters

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around the world.
[Music, whoosh]

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[Music]

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[Music]

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