Graeme Leslie Stephens FRS[4] is director of the center for climate sciences at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology[5] and professor of earth observation the University of Reading.[6][7] (wikipedia)
We've not been able to place these brush strokes into the context of a wider canvas.
It's been a long journey. And the science community is absolutely excited about this, naturally, because of the new nature of these observations.
The price of a bottle of water for every person in the United States is about what this mission will cost. Just one bottle of water. And yet the information we get about water supplies, the water cycle of the planet, I think is priceless.
Today we can't even tell how much of a cloud is making precipitation.
It provides an in-depth profile through the clouds where we can see processes in clouds which fresh water is created in.
It provides a look at clouds somewhat analogous to a CAT Scan. It provides a kind of in-depth profile through the clouds and we can see the processes in clouds - where fresh water is created and the rain processes occur.
We've been waiting so long . . . I'm just kind of numb at this point. The excitement will come when the data starts flowing, in May, and we see the Earth like we've never seen it before.
We can't tell you, for example today, what fraction of the water in the sky falls as rain and snow at any instant in time.
Clouds grossly affect the greenhouse effect on the planet. So they play a very profound role in weather and climate. Yet taken altogether they are one of the most poorly understood aspects of the climate change problem.
We haven't seen Earth before like this, and we're going to discover new things about Earth and clouds that we've not experienced before.
