DENVER, Colorado — NASA’s realm is space. But from space, they watch the earth.
A project called the Global Precipitation Mission has been collecting detailed measurements of rain and snow for the past five years, but now they’ve found a way to expand that data.
“What we’ve done is kind of remastered this by looking back into the past with previous satellites and now have one continuous record over almost 20 years to really look at these patterns and changes," said NASA research scientist Dalia Kirschbaum.
This new record shows great detail, but perhaps more importantly, it shows great coverage. NASA says if you take the area covered by every single rain gauge in the world, it would only fill up two basketball courts. Satellites cover the entire planet.
“We check it against the rain gauges, and we get a continuous picture,” said Kirschbaum.
OCEAN DESERTS
One place where we do not have rain gauges or even radar coverage is on our oceans, but we know they have areas that get less rain than the Sahara Desert.
“Understanding these ocean deserts is the same as understanding where we have the major storm systems," said Kirschbaum. "Where it rains around the world greatly impacts the productivity of the ocean, or agriculture on land."
CLIMATE MODELS
NASA says this precipitation record will also help climate models with quandaries that they struggle to resolve, like the diurnal cycle – which is the way rain ebbs and flows with the daily heating of the earth.
"This is one of the things that wowed me the most when I first looked at this remastered version," said Kirschbaum. "You can really see in prominently in places like the Rockies, and with this detailed 30-minute view over 20 years, we have a much more accurate picture of those daily dynamics of rainfall."
GLOBAL WEATHER PHENOMENA
Climate scientists now have new data to make teleconnections between ocean currents and blobs of sea surface temperature anomalies, with weather patterns.
"For example, with this new 20-year record we can see multiple El Niños, and see how the precipitation is distributed," said Kirschbaum. "The key is now putting these observations into climate models and that will ultimately help us better forecast those extreme precipitation events."
DISASTER MODELING
NASA said they are also working to get this data into the hands of government decision-makers across the world to help them better understand things like flood and landslide risks, crop forecasting, and disease outbreaks.
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