Global Precipitation Measurements for Science and Society

The Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) mission is an international network of satellites that provide next-generation global observations of rain and snow. The GPM concept centers on the deployment of a GPM Core Observatory satellite (launched Feb 2014), which is a joint NASA/JAXA partnership. The GPM Core Observatory operates an advanced radar and radiometer system to measure precipitation from space and serves as a reference standard to unify precipitation measurements from a constellation of research and operational satellites.GPM has a unique role in providing datasets for science and societal applications related to the Earth's water cycle at both regional and global scales and over long time periods if one includes the 17-year record of precipitation from the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) along with the expected 10 years from GPM. GPM is a mission with both scientific and application goals and as such has both high-quality research data products and near real-time (NRT) data products. The NRT products are released 1-6 hours after data collection and are important for operational users and weather related disaster applications. Some products are every 30 minutes and at a 0.1deg by 0.1deg (~10km by 10km) footprint. The research products are used for scientific research and climatology and weather/climate models. During this lecture information will be presented on how the satellite instruments work, the retrievals algorithms perform, the data is used for scientific investigations and societal applications such as floods, landslides, cyclones, and how to obtain GPM datasets.

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Lecture slides