“Every morning at seven, Andrew Welch wakes up, cooks breakfast and checks the rain gauge sitting on a five-foot post in his backyard. He writes down the measurement, sends his kid off to school and then heads out to his workplace as a structural engineer. Welch is a citizen scientist. Around the world, hundreds of citizen scientists like him are collecting precipitation measurements from the ground that are useful for NASA’s Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) mission. GPM is an international satellite mission led by NASA and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency that provides rain and snow observations from space around the globe every three hours. GPM’s data will improve our understanding of water and energy cycles and extreme weather events, such as hurricanes, monsoons and droughts.”
