Blog - Kristen Weaver

One of the most important parts of the scientific process is communicating results, and a major aspect of that is displaying the data. Often, that means some sort of graph. However, it’s not always easy to decide which type of graph to use to best convey the message you want it to. Graphs should tell the story of the data, and it takes attention to the type of graph as well as formatting and...

Most cloud observations, including those using the GLOBE Observer app and even many from satellites, focus on the surface of clouds. It’s also useful, however, to be able to look inside clouds, especially storm clouds, to be able to get a picture of what’s going on now, and what might happen next. As an example, let’s look at Hurricane Joaquin, which was over the Caribbean in late September...

Not all raindrops are created equal. The size of falling raindrops depends on several factors, including where the cloud producing the drops is located on the globe and where the drops originate in the cloud. For the first time, scientists have three-dimensional snapshots of raindrops and snowflakes around the world from space, thanks to the joint NASA and Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency...

Check out this diagram from the NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Information, showing some of the interesting anomalies and events for January 2016. If you visit their website, you can look at similar charts for other recent months, or annual summaries such as the one below, for 2015.

GPM's ground validation campaign called OLYMPEX is in full swing! (See my earlier blog post for more background about the campaign.) You can visit the OLYMPEX website to see daily precipitation data, like this image below: If you go to the website itself, you can click on any of the points to get more detailed information about that station, see the latest satellite and  coastal radar...

Many of you contributed data during the GPM-GLOBE Precipitation Field Campaign earlier this year.  Here's an opportunity to learn about an upcoming scientific field campaign, upon which our student field campaign was modeled.  The Olympic Mountain Experiment, or OLYMPEX, is a NASA-led field campaign, which will take place on the Olympic Peninsula of Washington State from November...

Last Friday, February 27th, was the one-year anniversary of the launch of the Global Precipitation Measurement Mission Core Observatory, and coinciding with that event, released its first global map of rainfall and snowfall, covering the period from April 2014 to September 2014. The data map combines measurements from 12 satellites and the GPM Core Observatory, which serves to unify the data...

We're just over two weeks in to the campaign, and I wanted to give a shout out to those schools who have so far entered data. Some of them are entering data from multiple sites at their school to have so many data points in two weeks. Keep up the good work, and more updates coming soon! School Name City State/Country Data Entries February 1st through 15th Sumarska i...

Introduction: The Global Precipitation Measurement Mission and GLOBE Student Field Campaign by Kristen Weaver, GPM Education Specialist My original topic for this introductory blog was going to be how to participate in the field campaign, but those details are well covered in the "How to Participate" section. For any technical questions, the GLOBE Support Team is always helpful, or for other...