Question: do you like satellites?

Hayley Evers-King answered on 10 Mar 2013:

I love satellites! If we didn’t have them, my job would be very difficult.

The reason I like them so much is that they provide so much information. The oceans, which I study, change over lots of different timescales – we have tides which happen daily, the seasons which effect the life in the ocean during the year and the climate changes on even longer timescales which can effect the ocean as well. The oceans also change a lot over different areas – shallow areas near the coast are very different to the deep, open oceans. With satellites we can collect information on the oceans over all these time and space scales! We can’t do that with a ship – we can only get information from the exact point where our ship is at that exact time.

This makes satellites very useful for helping us answer lots of questions. The data can tell you where best to sail your ship to get help from a fast current, or tell you how warm the ocean is, which is important for predicting the weather. The data from satellites is also often free – e.g. from NASA – you can even look at it online! This is great for countries like those in Africa, which often can’t afford to launch their own satellites. Here , in South Africa, we use satellite data to check water quality, understand how much rain we’re going to get to water farmland understand our fisheries.