CloudSat

Part of NASA's fleet of weather- and climate-tracking satellites, CloudSat used advanced radar to examine the inner structure of clouds, helping researchers better understand how severe tropical cyclones as well as climate changes related to clouds occur.

CloudSat embarked on a new mission phase to study the genesis and patterns of tropical cyclones. It played an instrumental role in new techniques for estimating the intensity of hurricanes from space, in addition to producing data about links between pollution and rainfall.

Key Discoveries

• CloudSat revealed how often the clouds above Earth rain and snow. This is information that we did not know before, principally because many regions on Earth are not instrumented on the ground to obtain this information, such as over the oceans and over sparsely-populated land areas such as the polar regions.
• CloudSat revealed how much ice and water are contained in clouds globally.
• CloudSat determined how clouds heat or cool the atmosphere.
• CloudSat allowed scientists to understand how often and how quickly rain develops in clouds.
• CloudSat provided the first quantitative estimate of global snowfall.
• CloudSat given scientists a deeper understanding of how pollution, volcanic emissions and other atmospheric 'aerosols' interact with clouds to affect precipitation and cloud lifetime.
• CloudSat provided unique insight into the effect of cloudiness on the acceleration of polar and Greenland ice melting.