Having grown up in Venezuela in South America, there temperature changes for example, there's more temperature variation from day to night than there is over the entire season. For example, there's a wet season and a dry season, but there isn't a season like we have here in the northern hemisphere where we're getting ready to go into fall and we anticipate winter, colder temperatures. It just goes to show people's perspective of change is different, depending on where you live, of course. It kind of reinforces the types of things that NASA does in the sense that we do study changes across a whole range of spatial scales and temporal scales so things that are changing on a daily basis such as solar energy or temperature. Things that are maybe changing more on a monthly or weekly basis, which could be sea surface temperature, surface greenness for example. When we look at one decade against the next is when we can start seeing that things are getting warmer decade to decade to decade, and not necessarily from day to day or week to week, month to month. So that's a very important distinction.

A lot of the work that I've done where we study urbanization and expansion in the Chesapeake Bay watershed is we want to understand, well, if we increase urbanization by X amount, what does that mean in terms of water quality, in terms of ecosystems of a whole host of issues. So really that is where the science comes in to utilize all the data sets that we have from space and to give us some ideas and answers as well.