Well, with a near 20-year record of rain and snow, we now have the most detailed view of our daily weather from space.
Hi, my name is Dalia Kirschbaum. I'm a research scientist here at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt,
Maryland.
We know that as the climate changes, the wet areas will get wetter and the dry areas dryer. We also know that these
changes aren't uniform, and so clues from the past can help us get a better sense of how precipitation may move and change in
the future.
One advantage of being able to look back 20 years, is we can look at the changing patterns in El Nino, which cause some areas to
get wetter in some dryer. So with this long and accurate record, we can test climate models using observations of the past
to better predict what the future might hold.
We have so many
tools and data sets at NASA that can help people around the world and the fact that all of this data is free and open
creates this powerful tool for people to use to make more effective decisions or learn more about their environment
every day.