NASA taps Chapman to study global rainfall

The Orange County Register

September 30th, 2008,

By Gary Robbins

Chapman University’s recent hiring of a large group of physicists and computational scientists is paying dividends. One of the school’s newest scholars — Eyal Amitai — is transferring a pair of federal grants to Chapman, providing the school with more than $150,000 in research money.

Amitai is currently working at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Research Center in Maryland, where he’ll remain until next year. But he’s also on the Chapman faculty, and he’s begun collaborating with famed UC Irvine hydrologist Soroosh Sorooshian on a project meant to provide more accurate readings of global rainfall. Such precipitation is measured by satellites. But the satellites only estimate rainfall. Amitai, under a $53,000 sub-contract to UCI, is comparing those estimates with rainfall that’s actually measured on the ground.

“We need to tweak the satellites so that we get better readings from the clouds,” says Sorooshian. “It’s important in understanding the nature of climate change, and Amitai is helping with that.”

Seperately, the National Science Foundation has given Amitai almost $100,000 to produce more accurate measurements of how much rain falls at sea. NSF says Amitai and his collobrators will “use the sound produced by rainfall underwater to quantitatively measure rainfall at sea. it will lead to a beteter understanding of how to use passive ambient sound to monitor the marine environment and it will contribute to the ability to monitor important climate processes globally.”

Over the past couple of years, Chapman has made an aggresive push into research to broaden the university’s scholastic outlook. The move led Chapman to hire two groups of scientists from George Mason University, including Nobel laureate Vernon Smith and renowned physicist Yakir Aharonov.