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When Typhoon Sinlaku struck the Northern Mariana Islands and Guam, it disabled ground-based weather radars and rain gauges – the very tools designed to track the storm. As part of the coordinated U.S. response to Sinlaku, the NASA Disasters Program shared IMERG satellite-based observations of rainfall, filling a critical data gap and giving responders a clearer view of the storm’s impacts.

In April 2026, Typhoon Sinlaku impacted the Pacific Islands of Guam, Saipan, and Tinian. As the storm approached the islands and made landfall, NASA's Global Precipitation Measurement mission (GPM) satellite and multi-satellite data-processing algorithms gave insights into the rain that fell from this powerful storm. Now, learn how GPM helps us go beyond individual snapshots of surface rainfall by observing Typhoon Sinlaku over time and through the depth of Earth's atmosphere. The Time Dimension Because of technological limitations, satellite instruments that see into a storm don't hover over

The GPM Core Observatory flew over the center of Super Typhoon Sinlaku at 12:08 UTC (10:08 pm LST) April 12th, providing a detailed look into the structure and intensity of the precipitation within Sinlaku.

After intensifying into a powerful Category 4 cyclone (Category 5 on the Australian scale) in the Coral Sea, Narelle made landfall on the east coast of Queensland, before continuing on across the Northern Territory, and turning south to make landfall yet again in Western Australia. Along the way, Narelle brought gusty winds and heavy rains to all three regions. Narelle first began as a westward-moving area of low pressure south of the Solomon Islands. Warm sea surface temperatures (SSTs), weakening wind shear, and persistent convective activity allowed the circulation to organize such that the

In many places, the amount of that rain falls on a particular day or hour is influenced by multiple natural cycles that exist simultaneously on different time scales. One such cycle repeats every 24 hours, and another repeats every year. The global extent of these cycles can be studied using NASA's IMERG precipitation estimates that have been generated for 1998 to the present. Most of Earth's precipitation falls as rain, and the rest falls as snow, hail, or other forms of precipitation. The length of IMERG's data record makes it possible to average out some of the random error and unrelated