I'm Gail Skofronick-Jackson, the Global Precipitation Measurement Project Scientist. This is a great
dataset that has recently been delivered by the Global Precipitation Measurement team.
It shows that we are able to measure both the regional scale and the global scales of
precipitation at a very fine temporal resolution every 30 minutes. IMERG provides high resolution
data, 10 kilometers by 10 kilometers, about the size of a suburb of a city. I'm George
Huffman, I'm the Deputy Project Scientist for the GPM mission. What this new dataset
does is to look under the clouds and see what the precipitation is doing. This is a new
effort and considerably more difficult than the cloud maps. In the Northern Hemisphere
we have a summer season, but in the Southern Hemisphere, you see a winter season. And during
the winter season we all expect to see snow, and as you can see in the blue-colored part,
we are actually getting snow from these algorithms that are estimating falling snow from space.
In particular I've really appreciated looking at the Southern Ocean, that is the band of
ocean that runs south of South America, Africa, and Australia. When you look at the Southern
Ocean, you see these numerous swirls. There's very little land to get in the way and as
a result, these storms just swirl around Antarctica continually. In the tropics near the Equator,
the precipitation tends to run from East to West, and it's very, what we call, convective.
A lot of splotchy stuff that comes and goes quickly. The rain that falls over your backyard
might actually affect the people in Europe as the storms go across the Atlantic Ocean.
They might affect the tropical rains. And all the precipitation is interrelated all
around the globe.