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As you can see, it
is snowing pretty good here this morning at the CARE site. Pretty nice, large aggregates,
this is exactly what we're looking for, and
it keeps coming down.
Scientists get really excited over data, and that can really
be enjoyable because you end up having a "nerd
moment," where "Holy cow, this data looks really amazing!" And then
you're kind of like, Wow, should I really get that excited about it? And then you're like, Yes, I
should be because I've traveled all this way to do it. But, you know, those kind of moments are kind
of the most special things that I have as a scientist, where you make these initial
discoveries. Then you get to do the hard work of trying to make sure that they're
making sense, and then publishing your results and sharing them with the community.
I grew up in upstate New York, in one of the snowbelt regions, and
I've always loved precipitation and it's fascinated me,
and that's really focused my career on studying something that's always interested me for a long
period of time. Even going back to elementary school, I was a kid that used to keep a
rain gauge in the back yard and measured precipitation and kept track of it.
And I was always interested in weather, and now I get to live my dream.
And so GPM, when it launches in a few years, is
going to provide really high quality estimates of precipitation in
places where nobody lives, but it's really important for climate
as well as understanding weather forecasting and things like that. I look to
investigate how precipitation changes
in different weather regimes, and so what we want to try to understand
as we go to these higher latitudes--how do the weather systems interact with
precipitation and how well can we measure those things? And part
of that obviously is to go up there and validate these things as well. So another part of my
research is taking measurements from the ground in various places
in the world and try to validate the satellite estimates that we're putting out, and
making sure that they're high quality. I get really excited when we start to
put data together and we make a diagram, and wow, it starts to
make sense. And so that's really what motivates me to kind of
explore, and it's nice that NASA provides this sort of observations
where we can really explore our own planet in a very amazing way.
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Rain falling