Earth’s Weather Watchers

01When I was growing up in Minnesota, the first thing we always ask about is the weather.

02The first thing you talk about is weather in the Midwest, at least from my upbringing.

03Good morning, Minnesota.

04We've got some cold weather headed our way this weekend with temps around negative 15 degrees Fahrenheit and dropping.

05So it was always first and foremost because it was either really cold or it was really wet or it was unseasonably warm.

06And I think that that was always just how we present kind of the status of the day.

07As we look into next week, we might get some sun, but we're spending a few solid days below zero.

08And don't forget about that wind chill.

09We are impacted by weather all the time, every day.

10We make choices about our clothes, about our cars, about schools, opening or closing.

11To be able to have tools and develop tools to better understand those processes.

12Is so vital to advancing kind of this integrated understanding of our Earth system.

13NASA's Curious Universe This is NASA's Curious Universe.

14Our universe is a wild and wonderful place.

15I'm your host, Patti Boyd.

16And in this podcast, NASA is your tour guide.

17Take a minute and think about how you got ready this morning.

18Or how you will get ready later today.

19Did you decide to wear a t-shirt or put on a heavy jacket?

20Did you slip on some flip-flops?

21Or pull on snow boots instead?

22Are you going sledding today or surfing?

23Odds are your decisions had something to do with the weather.

24Sure.

25The weather today, tomorrow, and even yesterday has a huge impact on how we go about our lives.

26Whether we think about it or not.

27And the weather doesn't just affect what we choose to wear on a given day.

28It affects our decisions.

29If you know a storm is coming, you might decide to stock up on groceries.

30And here at NASA, the weather decides if we can send a rocket into space.

31Many government agencies keep track of Earth's changing weather.

32NASA collaborates with NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, to help monitor trends and predict upcoming weather events that could really impact people on the ground.

33So what exactly do we mean when we talk about the weather?

34We're talking about precipitation.

35We're talking about temperature.

36We're talking about humidity.

37What the wind will look like.

38We're talking about how a natural disaster could impact a certain area in the next couple of days.

39My name is Marangeli Cordero Fuentes.

40I am a tropical cyclones expert.

41I am the program manager for one of the big NASA science contracts for hydrosphere, biosphere, and geophysics.

42Marangeli is one of NASA's meteorologists who uses models and data to predict what the weather will be.

43It's so important for people to be prepared, especially when it comes to severe storms or other unusual weather events.

44One of the first goals of weather scientists is to make sure people know what's coming before it gets there.

45For me to have the ability to tell somebody that is close to me or not even, even a stranger, it's extremely personal to let people know that they have to get ready, let people know that you might have 36 inches of snow coming your way, make sure that you have all your basic needs, your medication, you have your food, etc.

46So NOAA is the agency that really does all the public forecasts and predictions for the general public.

47But one of the responsibilities that NASA has a partner to NOAA is to launch weather satellites into orbit and build these instruments that these satellites have to collect information like temperature.

48Some of that data, a large number of that data, comes from satellites, about 6 to 7 million at a time.

49We aid other agencies in their ability to do proper weather forecasting by providing these vehicles that help them collect that data and then give you a five-day forecast.

50Scientists at NASA track our everyday weather, but also extreme or strange weather events.

51Marangeli specifically studies tropical cyclones or hurricanes.

52These huge storms start out along the coast of Africa and build as they travel across the ocean.

53If they meet land, they can cause a lot of destruction.

54So scientists like Marangeli watch them carefully as they form and use models to predict if and when they might make landfall.

55If you have a series of thunderstorms that come into the ocean and they start feeding out of that warm water and humidity and latent heat, etc., they will intensify.

56The gasoline of a hurricane is warm water.

57If you think of a hurricane, you think about a cylinder.

58From the bottom of the ocean to the top of the troposphere, which is the first layer of the atmosphere, you're going to have this eye or cylinder.

59The clouds are just rotating around that centric low.

60At the bottom in the ocean, like right at the surface of the ocean, this centric low is just getting water, warm water in, up.

61When the water goes up, when you hit land, that's what causes a storm surge, right?

62Because there's nowhere to go up.

63You're going to hit land.

64It's just going to go into the land.

65Marangeli grew up on the island of Puerto Rico, which is often in the path of tropical storms.

66Having experienced these storms firsthand, she knows just how important it is to be informed.

67I moved out of Puerto Rico a long time ago, but I still have this sense of responsibility to let them know what I believe is going to happen if a storm forms.

68And after looking at all the data and looking at my knowledge, right, after utilizing all that, to let them know, if I were you, I will prepare for a disaster.

69And that's what happened when Maria hit.

70Hurricane Maria was a Category 5 hurricane that hit the Caribbean head-on in 2017.

71Puerto Rico, Dominica, and St.

72Croix sustained lasting damage.

73Maria was the deadliest storm of the 2017 hurricane season.

74It was five days before when it formed.

75I saw every model predicting a hit directly to Puerto Rico.

76And the forecast never changed.

77The models were to the T, to the point, never changed.

78And I remember calling my mother and saying, I'm sorry I have to tell you this, but you're going to get hit by a hurricane.

79At the time, I was honestly not expecting it to become a Category 5 hurricane.

80I was more looking into a three.

81I think it was one of my worst experiences to let my family know.

82I have family that I knew their homes were not going to sustain and stay up.

83So I had to tell family members, don't stay in your house.

84Your house will not survive this.

85Many of them lost everything.

86If they stayed in their homes, they would have lost their life.

87In this case, Marangeli was able to contact her family directly, while NASA, NOAA, and even European weather agencies collected and shared the data and let the public know what was coming.

88And that's the goal for so many weather scientists, to make sure people all over the world are well informed.

89It's extremely important to make sure the public knows what's coming.

90Science has advanced so much in my field that we are capable, as tropical cyclone scientists, to save lives.

91In order to warn people about weather events like these, meteorologists take in tons of data.

92These phenomena are huge and interconnected, so weather trackers like Marangeli study everything from pressure, temperature, precipitation, and more.

93They put all that data into mathematical models to forecast when and where storms can occur.

94Math is a big part of meteorology.

95It's all about equations and all about numbers.

96So the biggest tool that we use is programming.

97You know, we're programming all day.

98You're dealing with large numbers of data, and we build subcodes that will allow us to read massive amounts of data in a couple of seconds.

99Scientists could predict where and when Hurricane Maria would make landfall five days before it happened.

100But how do we collect the information that makes that possible?

101NASA builds and launches Earth-observing satellites that orbit our home planet, taking pictures and keeping track of tons of different weather information.

102This is where our partnership with NOAA comes into play.

103Hi, my name is Dan Lindsay.

104I work for NOAA, which is the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

105And I work for the satellite portion of NOAA.

106We call that NESDIS.

107It's an acronym, as usual, with the government.

108I'm a meteorologist by training, or I guess technically an atmospheric scientist, basically the same thing.

109I got interested in weather as a kid.

110I grew up in Georgia.

111You may remember the Storm of the Century, which was a big storm that happened along the east coast of the U.S.

112back in 1993.

113I was in high school at the time, and we received in North Georgia 16 inches of snow, which to me was the most exciting thing in the world, because in Georgia it doesn't snow very often, and usually just an inch or two at a time.

114Dan is part of a huge team of scientists on the NOAA side, monitoring the changing patterns of Earth's weather.

115What I'm actually more involved in with regard to weather is the observational side.

116It's not predicting what's going to happen tomorrow necessarily, but it's observing what is happening now.

117And one of the most fundamental ways to do that is from satellites.

118In order to forecast what's ahead for tomorrow's weather, you have to watch what's happening today.

119Dan and other scientists use imaging and information from satellites orbiting the Earth to keep track of weather worldwide.

120NOAA currently owns or operates 16 satellites all orbiting out in space.

121These Earth-observing satellites come in all shapes and sizes.

122They range from the size of a riding lawnmower to a small school bus.

123One type of satellite is called a geostationary satellite.

124It orbits at the same rate that the Earth spins.

125So what that means is it's always looking at the same place on Earth at all times.

126The advantage of that is we're able to collect an image every few minutes and string those together into a series of images that we would call a loop or an animation.

127And it's really analogous to time-lapse photography from Earth.

128We collect this at different wavelengths, including the visible, so it's sort of an approximation of what our eyes would see if we were sitting up on the satellite looking down.

129And the result of that is we can track clouds and track storm systems.

130There's a hurricane striking Florida.

131They'll show satellite images, satellite animations of the hurricane spinning and then coming onshore.

132That data is collected from these weather satellites that I'm talking about.

133Dan works on a fleet of satellites called GOES, an acronym for Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellites.

134The moving images you might have seen on a weather report or news program likely came from these satellites.

135We are monitoring this storm right here as it's coming in over the ocean.

136And you can see from the satellite images that it's building up steam in the Atlantic.

137We'll be watching it, though, and keeping you up to date on how things look out there.

138By taking pictures of the same area over and over again, we can watch where storms move and how they change.

139Plus, by having this view from above, we can take the huge size of these systems into account.

140The biggest advantage of satellites is the ability to see a very large area at the same time, including remote areas.

141Let's say we were on the Earth and we wanted to know what is happening halfway between California and Hawaii.

142So this is in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.

143That's not easy to do.

144We could send a ship out there, but, you know, a ship is just going to give you a point observation at the surface.

145From a satellite, we're so far away at this geostationary orbit that we can see the entire hemisphere all at once.

146And we scan the entire hemisphere every 10 minutes.

147It allows us to keep track of where the storms are, to be able to track them, and in some cases warn the public if it's something like a hurricane or other dangerous things that we can see from satellite.

148Earth-observing satellites like GOES scan large areas at once, whole hemispheres.

149And they have an additional function that really comes in handy during an emergency.

150Say that someone is lost, lost at sea, they can put out sort of an SOS, help me please, type of signal.

151Our GOES satellites are able to relay that message back to people who can actually send out a help party.

152As a NOAA scientist, Dan works closely with NASA's Earth team to observe the weather.

153NASA is responsible for building and launching satellites into orbit.

154And from there, NOAA takes in data and distributes it to the public.

155Generally speaking, NOAA's job is to take the data from the satellites, provide it to the National Weather Service, which is another part of NOAA.

156The National Weather Service then, and I'll use a severe thunderstorm as an example, they would take that information and issue their severe thunderstorm warning.

157And as you can see here, we've got a storm front moving in from the southeast.

158We're tracking thunderstorms with high winds and the potential for some hail.

159And they would tell the public, large hail is possible, damaging hail, strong winds, greater than 60 miles per hour are possible.

160Take necessary precautions, those types of warnings.

161Now would be a great time to charge up your batteries.

162Look around for some blankets and candles, just in case we do lose power during the storm.

163Make sure you stay off the roads if you can, because it might get kind of slippery and dangerous.

164And there's even things beyond weather, which we contribute to, things like wildfires.

165Wildfires have been a big problem, especially the last few years, and especially out west.

166Our satellites are able to detect the hot spots from those wildfires as well.

167The National Weather Service is responsible for a lot of the notifications you've probably seen about weather.

168The warnings come on different cell phone apps, local news, and radio stations.

169And even those interruptions that can sometimes play during a TV show.

170So now that the weather has been predicted and monitored, what comes next?

171This is when the science of understanding and responding starts.

172My name is Dalia Kirschbaum.

173I am chief of the Hydrological Sciences Lab at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.

174I also do research in natural disasters and work with new missions at NASA to study rain and snow around the world.

175I loved math from a really early age.

176In fact, I would always remember sneaking little math scrap sheets of paper at home to do extra math problems.

177But I really wasn't quite sure where to take it.

178And so I decided to pursue my Ph.D.

179and really focus on how we can understand natural disasters, which is an area that I found fascinating.

180Who would have thought our everyday weather would have so much to do with math?

181But scientists use math and computer programming to find real-world solutions to problems on the ground.

182I grew up in Minnesota, and there weren't a whole lot of disasters that you would think of, like hurricanes or earthquakes, but there were frequent floods.

183And I do recall when I was younger and even in high school, we went to go help.

184Like when the Red River flooded, school groups went and helped to put out sandbags.

185And I think that that piqued my interest in extremes and how the hydrologic cycle, you know, doesn't always operate normally.

186It can have extreme impacts to communities.

187The connection that I found between extreme weather, tornadoes, and extreme thunderstorms, and then the impacts to populations always inspired me from an early age to see how I could help.

188The hydrological cycle is the way water moves around our Earth's systems.

189You might remember a diagram from science class showing evaporation, condensation, and precipitation.

190And when Dahlia studies the hydrological cycle, that does include things like rain and Minnesotan snow.

191But there's more to Earth's weather systems than you might think.

192One of the things that I do in my career is I study landslides.

193I've been doing this for about 15 years now.

194And I work with a really amazing team and collaborators all over the world to see how we can take different satellite data and combine it to better understand where and when landslides happen.

195And so we have the only dynamic or continually updating model of rainfall-triggered landslides around the world.

196And we've also incorporated the estimate of exposure, which means that not only where is the hazard for landslides, but who and what may be impacted.

197And we also look at not only modeling the processes, but using high-resolution imageries to map landslides and use artificial intelligence or machine learning techniques to really get at where these landslides are happening.

198And that helps us to better inform and improve our models.

199Dahlia is also a disaster response coordinator, working with communities around the world who have experienced a natural disaster.

200The disaster response team uses NASA data and satellites to map out how to best bring relief to areas in need and potentially prevent destruction in the future.

201One of the things that NASA has been enabling for many, many years is helping operational agencies and partners around the world to better respond to disasters.

202But not only that, to look at the entire disaster lifecycle, and that's from planning and forecasting through to response to ultimately recovery and hopefully resilience building.

203We have a team at NASA, again working with people all over the world, to help bring that different satellite information and products to bear during disasters and throughout the disaster lifecycle.

204We can use satellite data in many ways, from imaging hurricanes to tracking power outages.

205NASA launched its first weather satellite in 1960 and has been collecting data on Earth's changing ecosystems for over 60 years.

206By learning how weather patterns are changing, we can track how the Earth is changing over long periods of time.

207This is particularly important for studying climate change.

208I think the first thing to note is the difference between weather and climate.

209It's time, right?

210So weather is kind of like our mood on any given day, and climate's like our personality.

211One of the important things we do at NASA is have long-term data records to look and monitor our weather from day to day and observe those changes over time.

212So we know that our Earth is changing and warming, but it's not equal everywhere.

213Global observations of our Earth are really vital so that we can monitor these changes and their impacts over time, as well as use this information to improve our models and predict how our climate may change in the future.

214The Earth is warming, and we're already seeing changes in our weather patterns.

215Severe weather events have intensified as the climate of our home planet changes.

216We also know that we're experiencing these changes in each of our communities in different ways.

217And that's really where NASA Earth science is going, is how we can combine different types of satellite information with models and ground-based observations to really get an integrated picture of our Earth system, because it's not just looking at temperature, precipitation, or humidity.

218We need to understand all of it together.

219And that's really where we're evolving at NASA and with our partners, is to look at that in an integrated way, just like we do in our everyday lives, when we make an unconscious or conscious decision of whether or not to put on a sweatshirt or a t-shirt.

220That's kind of how I think of it, which is, I guess, all the time.

221Earth's weather is wild, but it isn't always wonderful.

222So whether we're facing a snow day or a natural disaster, we like to be aware.

223And this is more important than ever due to climate change.

224Everyone on our planet is impacted every day by the whims of the weather.

225So the next time you think about weather, if it's to bask in a sunny afternoon or prepare for an incoming storm, take a minute to think about how fascinating and interconnected the Earth really is.

226And that's been the 6 o'clock weather report.

227Now back to you.

228This is NASA's Curious Universe.

229This episode was written and produced by Christina Dana.

230Our executive producer is Katie Atkinson.

231The Curious Universe team includes Maddie Arnold and Michaela Sosby.

232Our theme song was composed by Matt Russo and Andrew Santaguida of System Sounds.

233Special thanks to Ellen Gray, Katie Mersman, Daryl Nail, Anthony Height, John Sackman, Lorne Mathery, Jake Richmond, and the Earth team.

234If you liked this episode, please let us know by leaving us a review, tweeting about the show at NASA, and sharing NASA's Curious Universe with a friend.

235Still curious about NASA?

236You can send us questions about this episode or a previous one, and we'll try to track down the answers.

237You can email a voice recording or send a written note to nasa-curiousuniverse at mail.nasa.gov.

238Go to nasa.gov slash curiousuniverse for more information.

239NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology