Interviewer: From the Carolinas to Maine residents are bracing for heavy rains and flooding
as hurricane Joaquin nears the east coast,
NASA scientists are keeping a close eye on the hurricane with the Global
Precipitation Measurement Mission, and here to tell us more is Dr. Dalia Kirschbaum at
NASAs Goddard's Space Flight Center, thanks for joining us. Interviewee: Thank you very much.
Interviewer: So you got a 3-d view of the hurricane, tell us what you're seeing?
Interviewer: Well the Global Precipitation Measurement Mission core observatory was launched in
February of 2014 and it has the most advanced instruments to measure
precipitation from space. Now what we see here is we can actually see
layer by layer through the storm with the dual frequency precipitation radar.
And that tells us a lot about the internal structure of the hurricane as it's developing.
Now with Joaquin we were able to observe these features as both heavy
rain below shown in red to green, as well as snow and ice a lot, and so
what's really interesting about this image we took on September 29th is actually
we can see rainfall and snow piling up on the eastern part of the storm
which indicates there's actually pretty strong environmental winds that are
inhibiting it from getting more intense but we know that soon after that the storm
the winds died down and the storm was able to gain in strength.
Interviewer: So what's causing the hurricane to intensify into a
stronger storm? Interviewee: Well initially the storm was sitting over a pool of warm
water, but they had really strong winds. But once those environmental winds
died down, the storm was able to rapidly intensify. And so
what we can do with the GPM satellite, in fact it took an image
just recently last night. You can see this kind of strong rainfall
associated with this kind of classic donut shape of a very intense storm.
And sort of like an x-ray of a storm. So this is really important information
for hurricane forecasters around the world such as the National Hurricane Center to get a
better sense of a storm structure as well as where it might go.
Interviewer: Well the east coast has already experienced heavy rainfall from a stalled weather system
what can we expect as hurricane Joaquin moves northward. Interviewee: That's right we're already pretty
saturated here so one of the things that we're able to do with this
Global Precipitation Measurement Mission, network of satellites is have
a continuous picture of rainfall that allows us to look at accumulation.
Now there was a pretty large frontal system that's been stalled out on the eastern seaboard
for quite sometime. And so with this rainfall accumulation we can observe
those heavy rainfall totals as well as where it might cause flooding
as well as see where Joaquin is developing and causing a lot of intense rain
in the Bahamas as it became a category four storm.
Interviewer: How will forecasters and emergency managers use this information?
Interviewee: Well the Global Precipitation Measurement Mission network of satellites
provides this global picture of rain and snow everywhere around the world every
30 minutes and that data is critical to track storms around the world
as well as in our backyard. So in the US we're able to actually
see how the storm is changing and moving, and that data
which is freely available goes to a lot of different weather forecasting agencies
around the world and is important to tell us what are weather might be today as well
how are climate might change in the future. Interviewer: And where can we learn more?
Interviewee: We learn more about this at nasa.gov/gpm as well as at out
Twitter handle nasa_rain. Interviewer: Great! Thanks so much for joining us.
Interviewee: Thank you very much.