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Satellites & Cholera
Thu Oct 07, 2004
Listen in RealAudio 
Other uses for Weather Satellites, next on The Weather Notebook.
Hi, I’m Bryan Yeaton for The Weather Notebook. The instruments that monitor our
weather—like satellites—can also have other uses. One of those, according to Juli
Trtanj, Director for NOAA’s Ocean Human Health Initiative, is to monitor cholera, here
and around the world.
BY: Does that surprise a lot of people: to find that cholera is right around here in the
United States?
JT: Probably, because, you know, you eat fish and shellfish from the Chesapeake Bay.
We have a good public health sanitation system, but that’s not true for all parts of the
world.
BY: What specifically can the satellites tell?
JT: They can tell you sea surface temperature and sea surface height. Some can
actually do the salinity and turbidity. And they can also give you information about El
Nino and part of this is related to the onset of the monsoons and the onsets of El Nino
are related to when the monsoons come and how severe they are. NOAA is working
pretty hard to build an observation system in the Indian Ocean and to build an
integrated ocean observation system that tackles more of the coastal zone, so it’s all
beginning to come together. And I think that the more we can look at how our
observations and how our research actually lead to some real improvement in public
health, and also a greater understanding of how what we are doing to our environment
is affecting our health too.
BY: So the satellites don’t actually see cholera but they can monitor the conditions that
are great for cholera to flourish.
JT: Correct. Now those conditions alone would not necessarily be predictive and that’s
the point I’m trying to understand through a modeling exercise.
For more information, check out today’s show at www.weathernotebook.org. Our show
is produced by the Mount Washington Observatory, with support from Subaru of
America.
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