Ramblemuse Touch Points

I was noticing in the tweets coming out of the American Meteorological Society meeting in New Orleans that NASA and NOAA have renamed the recently launched polar orbiter, NPOESS preparatory project, the Suomi NPP, after the late Verner Suomi.

This brought back a memory confirming in my own mind the suitability of the choice. Years ago in writing my PhD thesis, I quoted from a section by Suomi on The Need for Climate Monitoring from a larger National Academies Press Report on Energy and Climate: Studies in Geophysics (1977). Looking back through Suomi’s writing, I’m amazed by how pertinent his plea for adequate monitoring remains today.

The sentences I’d quoted also remain particularly pertinent. They focused on the need to gain information from the immense potential flows of data.

An extremely important aspect of the entire climate monitoring activity is the data-processing effort required. It is possible for the secrets of nature to be hidden in a flood of data as well as in nature. Clearly, we need information more than we need data.

Thanks for the insights, Verner Suomi