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Interviewer: From the Carolinas to Maine residents are bracing for heavy rains and flooding 

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as hurricane Joaquin nears the east coast,

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NASA scientists are keeping a close eye on the hurricane with the Global  

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Precipitation Measurement Mission, and here to tell us more is Dr. Dalia Kirschbaum at

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NASAs Goddard's Space Flight Center, thanks for joining us. Interviewee: Thank you very much.

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Interviewer: So you got a 3-d view of the hurricane, tell us what you're seeing?

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Interviewer: Well the Global Precipitation Measurement Mission core observatory was launched in

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February of 2014 and it has the most advanced instruments to measure 

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precipitation from space. Now what we see here is we can actually see 

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layer by layer through the storm with the dual frequency precipitation radar. 

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And that tells us a lot about the internal structure of the hurricane as it's developing.

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Now with Joaquin we were able to observe these features as both heavy 

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rain below shown in red to green, as well as snow and ice a lot, and so 

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what's really interesting about this image we took on September 29th is actually 

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we can see rainfall and snow piling up on the eastern part of the storm

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which indicates there's actually pretty strong environmental winds that are 

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inhibiting it from getting more intense but we know that soon after that the storm

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the winds died down and the storm was able to gain in strength.

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Interviewer: So what's causing the hurricane to intensify into a 

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stronger storm? Interviewee: Well initially the storm was sitting over a pool of warm 

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water, but they had really strong winds. But once those environmental winds

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died down, the storm was able to rapidly intensify. And so

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what we can do with the GPM satellite, in fact it took an image 

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just recently last night. You can see this kind of strong rainfall 

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associated with this kind of classic donut shape of a very intense storm.

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And sort of like an x-ray of a storm. So this is really important information 

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for hurricane forecasters around the world such as the National Hurricane Center to get a 

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better sense of a storm structure as well as where it might go.

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Interviewer: Well the east coast has already experienced heavy rainfall from a stalled weather system 

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what can we expect as hurricane Joaquin moves northward. Interviewee: That's right we're already pretty

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saturated here so one of the things that we're able to do with this

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Global Precipitation Measurement Mission, network of satellites is have 

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a continuous picture of rainfall that allows us to look at accumulation.

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Now there was a pretty large frontal system that's been stalled out on the eastern seaboard

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for quite sometime. And so with this rainfall accumulation we can observe 

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those heavy rainfall totals as well as where it might cause flooding 

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as well as see where Joaquin is developing and causing a lot of intense rain 

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in the Bahamas as it became a category four storm.

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Interviewer: How will forecasters and emergency managers use this information?

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Interviewee: Well the Global Precipitation Measurement Mission network of satellites 

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provides this global picture of rain and snow everywhere around the world every

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30 minutes and that data is critical to track storms around the world 

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as well as in our backyard. So in the US we're able to actually 

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see how the storm is changing and moving, and that data 

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which is freely available goes to a lot of different weather forecasting agencies 

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around the world and is important to tell us what are weather might be today as well

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how are climate might change in the future. Interviewer: And where can we learn more?

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Interviewee: We learn more about this at nasa.gov/gpm as well as at out 

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Twitter handle nasa_rain. Interviewer: Great! Thanks so much for joining us.

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Interviewee: Thank you very much.