George Huffman NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Winner of the 2022 Nordberg Award

 
"How Much Did it Rain in Your Backyard, and Around the Globe?"
  

It's really obvious how to measure rain and snowfall - just put a container out in the yard. But, it turns out the physical processes that create precipitation, and the practicalities of taking measurements everywhere, make satellites key tools in mapping rain and snowfall around the globe. Employing satellites in this meteorological detective story involves some science, some technology, a lot of computing, and, yes, rocket science. The payoff is that we know more about how much rain and snow fell in, say, 2010, than we knew at the time that it fell, and we’re ready to make the same kind of estimate for tomorrow's storms. There is still a lot of work to be done to make these estimates more reliable and accurate.

About the Speaker


Dr. George J. Huffman is a Supervisory Research Physical Scientist at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC), Greenbelt, Maryland, where he is the Project Scientist for the Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) mission, the lead for the GPM Multi-satellite Algorithm Team, and the Chief of the Mesoscale Atmospheric Processes Lab. His research has resulted in 154 publications, 17 as first author, and numerous presentations. After completing a B.S. in Physics at The Ohio State University (1976) and a Ph.D. in Meteorology at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1982), he was an Assistant Professor at University of Maryland, College Park, then moved to GSFC in 1988, where he consulted until entering government service in 2012. Dr. Huffman's primary focus is the design, implementation, and extension of combined (satellite-gauge) estimates of global precipitation. The resulting data sets include the Global Precipitation Climatology Project (GPCP) monthly and daily products (carried out as a contribution to the World Climate Research Program, WCRP); the NASA Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) Multi-satellite Precipitation Analysis; and the successor GPM mission's Integrated Multi-satellitE Retrievals for GPM (IMERG). Allied work includes estimating errors and extreme precipitation event statistics. Recent awards include NASA/GSFC William Nordberg Memorial Award for Earth Science, 2022; NASA/GSFC Robert H. Goddard Group Award for Science, GPCP Development Team, 2022; NASA/GSFC Robert H. Goddard Group Award for Science, IMERG Development Team, 2019; Fellow of the American Meteorological Society, 2019; and NASA Exceptional Service Medal, 2018.



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