Seeing Precipitation From Space

  • Released Tuesday, April 1, 2014

An extratropical cyclone spun across the North Pacific near Japan on March 10, 2014. The cyclone became the first storm imaged by NASA’s Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) Core Observatory, launched eleven days earlier. The two instruments aboard the satellite are tuned in to different types of precipitation—rain, snow, and any mixture of the two, letting scientists see exactly where each is falling inside a storm. This kind of detail is important for understanding how storms behave and how the water essential to life moves around the planet. Watch the video to learn more about the satellite and how it observes our watery world.

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Credits

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NASA's Scientific Visualization Studio

Release date

This page was originally published on Tuesday, April 1, 2014.
This page was last updated on Wednesday, May 3, 2023 at 1:51 PM EDT.