Greetings from Maryland!
I'm bringing NASA into your home today as I tell you some of the fascinating ways in
which NASA satellites are able to measure various things about our environment including
how much precipitation is falling.
My name is Dorian Janney, and I am the education and outreach specialist for the Global Precipitation Measurement Mission.
I also work with the GLOBE Program and I'm a GLOBE Master Trainer,
and I'm also a campaign coordinator for the GLOBE Mission Mosquito.
I wanted to bring NASA into your home today as I show you an easy online activity that you can do.
But I wanted to start off by showing you how many of us in the GLOBE Program and also with
a citizen science group called CoCoRaHS, measure precipitation that's falling in our own front or back yards.
What I have here is a rain gauge.
With my rain gauge, I check it once a day, usually I check mine in the morning, around 8:30 or 9:00 am
and I find out how much precipitation has fallen with the past 24 hours.
I'm going to need two hands for this.
So I'm going to take the top off, and here I have my tube that's inside.
Basically, this is just giving me a measurement of the height of how much precipitation fell in the last 24 hours.
We've had a lot of rain.
As a matter of fact, here I have over half an inch of precipitation.
In this case my gauge is measuring precipitation in inches.
We also have them that measure precipitation in millimeters.
So I actually have 0.55, a little over a half of an inch.
I can show you that when I pour this into the rain gauge, and if we were just measuring
it from the height there, you would see that it is a little more than a half of an inch.
We use this inner tube as kind of a zoom lens to help us be able to see more accurately
how much precipitation has fallen.
Alright, let's go inside now, out of the rain, and I'm going to show you how you can use
your computer and online resources to find out how much the Global Precipitation Measurement
mission measured in your back, or front, yard, any time over the past two decades.
It was really nice to welcome you to my yard, to get a chance to see my rain gauge, and
how I use my rain gauge to be able to measure precipitation from the ground.
There are also GLOBE schools all over the world that are using the GLOBE precipitation
protocols and a rain gauge to be able to measure how much precipitation is falling in their
schoolyards, or in their own yards.
As I mentioned, the CoCoRaHS program is a group of citizen scientists in the United States and Canada,
who are also using rain gauges and reporting in on their data in order
to give us a better understanding, and keep those of us who are interested in doing this
aware of how much precipitation is falling in our yards.
We're going to be working with this activity, called "From Satellites to Your Backyard,"
and I'm going to show you how you can find this activity, right there on that website,
gpm.nasa.gov/education.
This has all of the directions that you're going to need to be taking you through how
you can generate this information and better understand how much precipitation is falling
and has fallen any time over the past 20 years using both the data from the TRMM mission
and the GPM mission.
I'm going to start by showing you, here is a world map, and there is about where I am in Maryland.
To do this, to be able to access the data, you're going to want to go to the Giovanni website.
This a free website.
It is a good idea if you're going to work with this data, and you want to be able to
download data, to go ahead and log in and get a free account.
Otherwise you can continue, but you're going to have more limited access than you're going
to have if you use an account that you've set up.
Once you're in here, and again, don't worry about memorizing this, all of these directions
in that activity, and you've got even hyperlinks in that online activity to be able to follow.
Basically what you're going to be doing, is you're going to come over to "time series"
and we're going to look at "seasonal."
I"ll tell you why I chose seasonal data to begin with.
We can look at this data, like I say, for any time over the past two decades.
I have over here that I want the IMERG Final in my keyword.
I like to put that in first because it helps limit some of these other things.
I put in that I want from 2000 to 2019.
We do have about a two and half month delay in this final data product, this level 3 IMERG product that I like to work with,
so you won't be able to get the data until about two and half to three months after right now.
In order to put together those different satellite data, make it a nice clean product, and include
some of those rain gauge data, it takes a little while to do that.
Again, I picked the IMERGE Final, and then, this is kind of the magic of this, I told
you're going to be able to see it in your backyard.
Now there is actually about a 10 km swath that GPM is measuring, and you know sometimes
it can be raining in your backyard, and then across the street it's not raining or snowing?
This isn't going to be exact, but it's certainly going to characterize the general amount of precipitation that's falling.
Over here I put in my longitude and latitude, I don't know why it has to do it in that order,
and I have that in the notes, but you're going to be finding your decimal longitude and latitude,
and then you just stick it in there.
You just stick it in one time, so I put in -77.1963, then I put a comma, then I put in 39.2538.
You don't have to go ten digits, that's what I put in there.
Now that knows where to be looking for this data.
And again, I decided that I wanted to have seasonal, and then after I put this information in, I put "Plot Data."
Then, depending on how much data you want, and how fast your bandwidth connection is, it is going to generate your data.
So that we wouldn't have to wait, I went ahead and got my graph to show you.
At first, this is a crazy looking graph.
I chose inches and so that's what's being displayed over here, from one to eight inches.
I selected inches because that's what my rain gauge is measuring in, and that way I also
like to compare and contrast it to my local airport, which is in inches where I live.
You can set it to inches or to millimeters.
Just be sure for making these graphs that you set it to either millimeters per month or inches per month.
Here I'm looking for my location at inches per month and I chose looking at this for
just about the past twenty years, from 2000 to I guess I go to 2018 here.
Now this looks kind of crazy, here's what we're seeing.
This blue line here is showing us pretty much the winter, December, January, and February.
Where I live, some of that is falling as snow, some of it is falling as rain.
What we're looking at though, is liquid equivalence, though, so if it is snow, I let it melt in
my rain gauge, and then I measure how much the liquid was. We can see here as we're looking
at this over the years, that where I live in Maryland, we have a very variable amount
of precipitation, that falls throughout the seasons.
That's going to be important when I compare and contrast this to some other locations.
My black line, that's showing me the spring, March, April and May.
You can see how often we have more precipitation, and generally where I live that is in the form of being a liquid.
So then our summer, that's always liquid where I live, maybe some hail sometimes.
You can see that there are some years where we get a lot of precipitation in the summer.
Where this dot is here, this is showing me that in 2006, we got about five and a half
inches in that three month period.
Usually where I live, we have gotten about 43 inches of precipitation per year.
We are starting to see that that amount is changing, which is very interesting and another reason why I like to keep track of that.
And then of course, this is showing us the fall for the hemisphere that I live in, September, October and November.
Look at the variability there.
Pretty interesting to see that, let's see, over here in 2007, less that three inches
of precipitation fell throughout the fall, that three month period.
But over here in 2011. we had over six inches of precipitation that fell.
You can see over here, a large amount of precipitation, and that's in the summer.
We did experience a lot of flooding during that time, which is another thing that I just
find really interesting about being able to look at this data from a seasonal perspective.
I wanted to show you some of this data from some other locations.
Here, we're looking at a location in the South Sudan.
Some of you may know if you've learned about South Sudan that they have suffered from a
lot of problems with famine, and a lot of that is because they've had a lot of drought.
So of course with drought, we're talking about not enough precipitation.
Now if you look over here, again this is in inches, my other graph for Maryland was going
up to six, seven, eight inches falling in that three month period.
Here with this graph, we're going from zero to one point two inches falling in those three month periods.
If you take a look here, when do you notice that in this area of the South Sudan,
Which season do they appear to get most of their precipitation?
Or more than they usually do.
You might note that it is in their wintertime.
So December, January and February.
Again, that's pretty variable.
Let's see over here in 2006, they got almost an inch, but again that's in a three month period.
Over here in 2008 they got about an inch.
But look, there was from about 2010 through 2016, when they did not get very much rain
at all, and that is what was primarily responsible for the drought.
Which of course makes sense, a drought is talking about a situation in which you do not have much precipitation.
Here we certainly can see that.
I wanted to show you some other examples.
Here is a location in India.
Over here in southeast Asia, they experience something called monsoons.
Monsoons are where you have a lot of precipitation during certain months of the year, and not
very much precipitation during other months.
We certainly see that to be true.
Look at the summer months there.
And now, look at this scale.
Here we're going from zero to fifty inches falling in that three month period.
How amazing is that, compared and contrasted to what we were seeing in the South Sudan.
You notice here that some years, of course, there's a lot more precipitation that others,
but we see there's clearly a dry season during December, January and February, where that
blue line is, and clearly a very wet season during their monsoon season in the summer.
I wanted to give you an example of some of the GPM measurement data.
Here we see, in 2017, from July through September, there were extremely heavy monsoon rains.
Unfortunately, it resulted in the deaths of many, many people, and destroyed lots and lots of homes.
What this stresses to us is how important it is to know how much precipitation is falling
so that the government officials and the public health officials can be prepared for these extreme events.
Alright, so if you'd like to do this activity, and you are with a GLOBE school,
I have set up an activity where you're able to go in here and compare and contrast how much precipitation you found
or you can go and do this using any data, you don't even have to be a GLOBE school
that is in the GLOBE Program by using the Data Visualization tool.
Go in there and compare and contrast how much precipitation the rain gauges found,
to how much precipitation the satellite found.
You also can go to our Precipitation Education website, and find all kinds of activities.
There's an activity called Precipitation Towers, which takes some of that information I was
showing you for different locations around the world, and shows you how you can just
use blocks, or LEGOs to make a three dimensional bar graph of how much precipitation is falling.
You could make those for your own location.
We'd love to see them.
Also, be sure to take a look at the GPM website, or the Precipitation Measurement Missions,
Now it's the GPM website.
You can see the TRMM mission I was telling you about, Tropical Rainfall Measurement Mission,
and the GPM mission, and learn all kinds of really interesting things about how and why we measure precipitation from space.
I hope you enjoyed this presentation, and I hope that you will enjoy doing some NASA at home.
Have a wonderful rest of your day.