Gala Wind: A NASA Cloud Scientist Who Also Rehabilitates Abused Horses

Gala Wind. Photo: NASA/W. Hrybyk.

Gala Wind likes observing, as a scientist and as what NASA called a "horse whisperer". She is a research scientist in the Climate and Radiation Laboratory at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, and she was profiled in the center's Conversations with Goddard series.

Reading clouds from above

Wind uses data from sensors on satellites and aircraft to work out what clouds are like: how high and how thick they are, and whether they are made of ice or liquid water. Her group produces that data and makes sure it is reliable, so that others can use it in climate models, climate studies and other research.

Her favourite part of the job is field campaigns, unusual hours included; she has worked on them in Mexico, Houston and Costa Rica. In Costa Rica in 2007 she spent almost a month supporting the MODIS Airborne Simulator, an instrument flown directly beneath a satellite as it passed over, so that the aircraft's view and the satellite's lined up as closely as possible and one could check the other. That campaign was the first field test of a system she developed: CHIMAERA (Cross-platform HIgh resolution Multi-instrument AtmosphEric Retrieval Algorithms), which runs exactly the same code on the satellite and the aircraft data for a fairer comparison. It became the validation standard.

From Moscow to Goddard

Wind decided at 10, after reading Ivan Efremov's The Andromeda Nebula, to become an astrophysicist; her father was a physicist and her grandmother a biologist. She grew up in Moscow and, after finishing high school in 1994, moved with her father to St. Louis. She earned a bachelor's and a master's degree in computer science at the University of Illinois, paying her own way, and joined Goddard's Cloud Retrieval Group in 2002. She has stayed with that group, and in 2010 added a second master's, in atmospheric science, from the University of Maryland, going on to a doctorate. Astrophysics, which she worked in for four years, proved too theoretical for her, so she turned to satellite remote sensing "and never looked back". She began as a programmer and became a research scientist, and she stays because the work keeps changing. Her advice to newcomers: "If you get a crazy idea, try it out. The craziest idea is the one that just might work."

Listening to horses

Since 2005 Wind has helped rehabilitate abused horses at the Days End Farm Horse Rescue in Woodbine, Maryland, earning their trust so that they can be adopted. Working with horses is all body language, she says: stay calm, be clear about your intentions, and learn their subtle cues by keeping quiet yourself. "The first step is always observing, which transfers to being a scientist too."

Sources

• Elizabeth M. Jarrell, NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, "Gala Wind – Scientific Observer and Horse Whisperer," Conversations with Goddard; rewritten in hubnx's own words. Portrait from NASA.