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As you can see, it

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is snowing pretty good here this morning at the CARE site. Pretty nice, large aggregates,

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this is exactly what we're looking for, and

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it keeps coming down.

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Scientists get really excited over data, and that can really

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be enjoyable because you end up having a "nerd

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moment," where "Holy cow, this data looks really amazing!" And then

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you're kind of like, Wow, should I really get that excited about it? And then you're like, Yes, I

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should be because I've traveled all this way to do it. But, you know, those kind of moments are kind

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of the most special things that I have as a scientist, where you make these initial

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discoveries. Then you get to do the hard work of trying to make sure that they're

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making sense, and then publishing your results and sharing them with the community.

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I grew up in upstate New York, in one of the snowbelt regions, and

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I've always loved precipitation and it's fascinated me,

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and that's really focused my career on studying something that's always interested me for a long

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period of time. Even going back to elementary school, I was a kid that used to keep a

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rain gauge in the back yard and measured precipitation and kept track of it.

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And I was always interested in weather, and now I get to live my dream.

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And so GPM, when it launches in a few years, is

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going to provide really high quality estimates of precipitation in

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places where nobody lives, but it's really important for climate

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as well as understanding weather forecasting and things like that. I look to

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investigate how precipitation changes

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in different weather regimes, and so what we want to try to understand

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as we go to these higher latitudes--how do the weather systems interact with

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precipitation and how well can we measure those things? And part

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of that obviously is to go up there and validate these things as well. So another part of my

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research is taking measurements from the ground in various places 

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in the world and try to validate the satellite estimates that we're putting out, and

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making sure that they're high quality. I get really excited when we start to

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put data together and we make a diagram, and wow, it starts to

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make sense. And so that's really what motivates me to kind of

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explore, and it's nice that NASA provides this sort of observations

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where we can really explore our own planet in a very amazing way.

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Music

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Rain falling

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Rain falling

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