Just when you鈥檇 finally convinced yourself your career choice is making a difference, along comes Toby Minear with his work.
Minear is a fluvial geomorphologist. That means in his work at the he studies surface water bodies 鈥� rivers, mainly 鈥� and measures flows and conditions within them. He also worked with NASA on the , which measures , or surface level, and width of water bodies larger than 10,000 square feet. And when it鈥檚 time to check SWOT鈥檚 work, he jumps in a boat and takes field measurements of the rivers SWOT has observed.
That part of his job has taken him down the Colorado and the South Platte, the Missouri and the Mississippi. He鈥檚 also fact checked the and the , both in Alberta, Canada. And his work has critical global applications, especially in places like Africa and Greenland which he says use few if any water tracking .
鈥淲e鈥檙e basically trying to track how much water is where on the landscape,鈥� he said. 鈥淐urrently, we don鈥檛 have a sense of how much freshwater comes off the continents and flows into oceans.鈥� And that information is key to predicting things like changes in water supply and runoff into the sea.
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