Jul 16 1978
From The Space Library
NOAA announced it had developed a technique that would permit national weather centers around the world to monitor rainfall over agricultural areas, detect potential flash-flood situations, and predict rainfall from hurricanes while they were still at sea. Once the technique had been perfected, automated, and put into operation, scientists could use earth-orbiting satellites to estimate rainfall from convective (vertically-developed) clouds and to monitor the movement and distribution of precipitation over the planet's entire surface.
Dr. William Woodley and Cecilia Griffith of the Commerce Department's National Hurricane and Experimental Meteorology Laboratory had adapted the experimental method from a similar system of estimating rainfall from convective, weather systems in the tropics, applied successfully during cloud-seeding experiments in southern Fla. The imagery had revealed a difference between young rain-producing clouds and dying rainless systems, both of which had appeared in bright shades on satellite images. NOAA's National Weather Service had already made quasi-operational use of a similar method, applied by flood forecasters in predicting flood potential of approaching hurricanes and large thunderstorms. Woodley and Griffith had begun to use the technique in a real-time warning mode to detect potential flash flood situations. (NOAA Release 78-94)
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