This is CBS Eye on the World with John Bacheler. Here's John Bacheler.

This is CBS Eye on the World. I'm John Bacheler. It's a pleasure to welcome the Chief Science

Officer and Co-Founder of Cloud District, Beth Talman, who is also a professor at the

University of Arizona Geography. We are applying ourselves to the planetary geography.

For the crisis of flooding, you will recall recently flooding in China within complete

results, causing deaths and dislocation of hundreds of thousands dislocated, large numbers

dead, and a damage to the immediate territory of the floodplain. But flooding in China is

as old as the Chinese Emperor. And we turn to the surprise of flooding in Germany, a country

associated with pastoral farmland, catching the German farmers completely by surprise one evening,

crowding in their second floor or third floor for the damage that was being done to their village

and their way of life. Those two events lead us to the question of can we anticipate, can we learn?

Professor, a very good day to you. Your study, satellite imaging reveals increased proportion

of population exposed to floods, appearing in the peer-reviewed Nature magazine, the premier

magazine for science in Europe, matching science here. This is a revelation to me, but you've

been watching this story for some time. So let us begin with your tools. What is MODIS,

what is Aqua, what is Tara, good evening to your professor.

So thanks so much for having me. Yes, so let's talk about MODIS, Aqua and Tara. So,

Aqua and Tara are two satellites operated by NASA. And there's actually a lot of different

instruments collecting information about the Earth every day on these satellites. They circulate

the globe and give us information about the entire planet twice a day. And one of the instruments

mounted on each of these two satellites is called MODIS. And MODIS is a optical sensor that is,

you could think of it as taking pictures of the Earth, although it's collected much more information

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