ABOUT CLOUDSAT

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Part of NASA's fleet of weather- and climate-tracking satellites, CloudSat uses 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.

In August 2010, CloudSat embarked on a new mission phase to study the genesis and patterns of tropical cyclones. Since its launch in 2006, CloudSat has 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.

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CloudSat was selected as a NASA Earth System Science Pathfinder satellite mission in 1999 to provide observations necessary to advance our understanding of cloud abundance, distribution, structure, and radiative properties. Since 2006, CloudSat has flown the first satellite-based millimeter-wavelength cloud radar—a radar that is more than 1000 times more sensitive than existing weather radars. Unlike ground-based weather radars that use centimeter wavelengths to detect raindrop-sized particles, CloudSat's radar allows us to detect the much smaller particles of liquid water and ice that constitute the large cloud masses that make our weather.

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***fun fact:

Planned as a 22-month mission, CloudSat has crushed its mission goals and is still collecting data a decade after launch. As the second of NASA’s Earth System Science Pathfinder missions, CloudSat has lasted two decades past its original concept developed in the 1990s!