The Data Downpour

1. 0:04The GPM mission is a sophisticated network of satellites, covering the entire globe in less than three hours,
2. 0:12giving us an unprecedented picture of precipitation, from rain to falling snow, hurricanes to monsoons,
3. 0:20droughts and floods. So how do we get all of that information out of this? The short answer: Tons of data
4. 0:28from all over.
5. 0:32As GPM takes snapshots at precipitation, like in a major storm, the data gathered is transmitted
6. 0:40to a network of satellites called TDRSS.
7. 0:44Erich Stocker: The important thing to recognize is that the GPM satellite does not
8. 0:48talk directly to the Earth; it talks to the communications satellite which is known as TDRSS. And the TDRSS satellites
9. 0:57talk to a ground station, which is at White Sands, New Mexico, and that's a very effective way to get
10. 1:05continuous data, which cannot be gotten otherwise, unless you do direct broadcast and have many, many ground stations, which isn't
11. 1:13as effective as going through the TDRSS system.
12. 1:17The White Sands Ground Station then sends information about the health and
13. 1:21geolocation of the GPM Core satellite to the hub of all of this activity, the Missions Operations Center, located at NASA's
14. 1:29Goddard Space Flight Center. The raw data streams into Goddard's Precipitation Processing System, or PPS.
15. 1:37The data from the radar is routed through GPM's partner, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, for initial processing
16. 1:45and then is sent back to the PPS. George Huffman: The data that come down from
17. 1:49the satellite are actually not precipitation. They're in the form of radiances,
18. 1:53in the case of the microwave instruments, or reflectivities, in the case
19. 1:58of the radar. The computer codes I've been talking about--the algorithms-- are the way we get from numbers
20. 2:06that nobody including me can directly interpret to the thing we care about,
21. 2:10which is precipitation. The GPM mission is not just the Core spacecraft, but also a constellation of existing satellites
22. 2:18from partners around the world. Each constellation member may have its own
23. 2:22unique scientific objectives, but they all contribute data to the PPS in order to develop global precipitation products.
24. 2:30Erich Stocker: The Precipitation Processing System gets data from the satellite and various other sources and creates the science products
25. 2:38that are going to be used for both applications purposes, that is societal benefits, and scientific research. The PPS then produces
26. 2:46a suite of data products, including both instrument specific and merged data, unifying the data gathered by the international
27. 2:54partner satellites that make up the GPM constellation.
28. 2:58George Huffman: You could compare this to making soup. We have carrots, and we have onions, and we have potatoes.
29. 3:06They're all vegetables. And so you have to wash them, peel them,
30. 3:10take out the bad spots. That's a really important step, you don't want your soup to
31. 3:14taste bad. When you get done, of course, you have to taste test it to make sure the
32. 3:18seasoning right, and then you have to serve it. And so each of those steps
33. 3:22in a mathematical sense, is what we have to do in order to take all the
34. 3:26diverse sources of information and end up with a unified product which the user finds to be useful. These precipitation
35. 3:35products will be useful in many societal applications, like hydrologic modeling, mapping potential natural disasters, agricultural modeling, weather prediction,
36. 3:47and climate research. Erich Stocker: As we improve the precipitation retrievals that form the basis for these merged products
37. 3:55that will get better and better, and we'll be seeing actual satellite data rather than just forecasts.

Текст скрыт. Слушайте и старайтесь уловить общий смысл; щёлкните по размытой фразе, чтобы перейти к ней.