GPM Yields IMERG

April Showers Bring May Flowers. || NASA scientists talk about the new global portrait of rain and snow and why this world-wide view of precipitation is important for everything from knowing how much freshwater is available to drink, to forecasting natural disasters like hurricanes and floods, to understanding Earth in a changing climate. NASA’s Global Precipitation Measurement mission – GPM – sees through clouds to produce the most detailed world-wide view of rain, light rain and snow every 30 minutes. Scientists can now see weather fronts in the Southern Ocean, snow at the tops of hurricanes and watch a storm on the East Coast travel across the Atlantic bringing deluge of rain that causes flooding in England. A constellation of a dozen satellites provides this unprecidented look inside rain clouds, hurricanes and blizzards, giving scientists new insights into how these storms develop and intensify, which will improve weather forecasting.For click here. || Dr. Dalia Kirschbaum - NASA ScientistFor complete transcript, click here. || Dr. Gail Skofronick-Jackson - NASA ScientistFor complete transcript, click here. || Dr. Eric Brown de Colstoun - NASA ScientistFor complete transcript, click here. || Dr. Eric Brown de Colstoun - NASA ScientistThis interview is in Spanish. There is no transcript. || Dr. George Huffman

This is what falling rain and snow look like from space. || Take a tour of the first precipitation maps created from the IMERG data set in this video. || The IMERG data set covers the 87 percent of the globe that falls between 60 degrees north and 60 degrees south latitude (highlighted above). || The IMERG data set is updated every half hour, allowing scientists to study the evolution of storms as they march eastward across North America. || The high-resolution views provided by IMERG show how storm systems near the equator travel westward from Africa toward South America.

For complete transcript, click here. || Global Precipitation Measurement mission has produced its first global map of rainfall and snowfall.Like a lead violin tuning an orchestra, the GPM Core Observatory – launched one year ago on Feb. 27, 2014 as a collaboration between NASA and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency – acts as the standard to unify precipitation measurements from a network of 12 satellites. The result is NASA s Integrated Multi-satellite Retrievals for GPM data product, called IMERG, which combines all of these data from 12 satellites into a single, seamless map.This first IMERG data set spans the initial months of GPM data collection from April to September, 2014. The precipitation data collected covers the 87 percent of the globe that falls between 60 degrees north and 60 degrees south latitude, updated every half hour.The map covers more of the globe than any previous NASA precipitation data set, allowing scientists to see how rain and snowstorms move around nearly the entire planet. As scientists work to understand all the elements of Earth’s climate and weather systems, and how they could change in the future, GPM provides a major step forward in providing the scientific community comprehensive and consistent measurements of precipitation.

A condensed look at building the Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) mission. || A timelapse (2011-2014) of GPM in the clean room at Goddard Space Flight Center and at Tanegashima Space Center, Japan.

Animation of IMERG precipitation rates from 4/1/2014 through 9/30/2014 || NASA s climate and weather systems, and how they could change in the future, GPM provides a major step forward in providing the scientific community comprehensive and consistent measurements of precipitation. || Color bar for liquid precipitation rates (ie, rain rates). Shades of green represent low amounts of liquid precipitation, whereas shades of red represent high amounts of precipitation. || Color bar for frozen precipitation rates (eg, snow rates). Shades of cyan represent low amounts of frozen precipitation, whereas shades of purple represent high amounts of precipitation. || Animation of IMERG precipitation rates from 4/1/2014 through 9/30/2014 without annotation