BEG Researcher Gives Talk on Predicting Droughts and Floods at The Grace Museum

March 6, 2015

University of Texas at Austin researcher Todd Caldwell will give a talk about a new project to provide vital information for determining the chances of droughts and dangerous floods in Texas at The Grace Museum on Thursday, March 19, at 6 p.m.

Caldwell is a research associate at the Bureau of Economic Geology, a unit of The University of Texas at Austin Jackson School of Geosciences. He has headed up a project to create a new network of underground sensors in the Texas Hill Country called the Texas Soil Observation Network (TxSON). The network is linked to a NASA satellite and will provide information that will help throughout Texas and beyond.

TxSON is connected to NASA’s new Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) satellite launched in January. For Texas, a big payoff will be a solid estimate of how much water is stored in the soil. For NASA and the scientific community, the payoff will be the ability to predict weather on a global scale days or weeks ahead of time. NASA hopes to use the data to foretell drought and the potential for floods, wildfires and severe weather.

The Grace Museum, Feb. 15, 2015

Big Country Homepage March 6, 2015

Abilene Reporter-News, March 20, 2015

KTSX, April 10, 2015

Featuring: Todd Caldwell, research associate at the Bureau of Economic Geology