Question: Hi Hayley, my question is why do you want to explore the ocean with satilites i'm quit interested how you work with satilites. my last and final question is do you get to go out to the ocean and jump in and do meet dolphines,whales,sharks ect. thanks mariatereza

Hayley Evers-King answered on 11 Mar 2013:

Hi mariatereza,

We like to use satellites because they can take pictures of large areas of ocean every day. We couldn’t explore that much ocean with a boat – it would take a long time to cover the space and during that time things change a lot. So satellites really give us a big picture of what is happening in the ocean. We can use these pictures for many things – to look at how the ocean moves and what lives in it. This is important for weather prediction and understanding how much food there is for animals like whales. We can also use the pictures for telling people when water is safe to drink and where to sail their boats.

A lot of this work is done on computers, but I do get to go out on the ocean a lot too. We have to check what our satellites see – so we go out on boats and take measurements of things like the ocean temperature and samples of what is living in it (mostly tiny plant-like organisms called phytoplankton). The water where I work (in South Africa) is very cold, so I’m not often very keen to jump in! We do have to go in to the water sometimes to fix instruments and things like that and I like to go scuba diving. There are lots of dolphins, whales and sharks in the water here though – you can see a picture of a whale that I took on my profile. South Africa is famous for its great white sharks too – I have seen them in the water, but they can be quite dangerous!