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NASA Announces Long-term IMERG Satellite Record: A Near-Global 19-year Perspective on Rain and Snow NASA has just released its newest estimate of rain and snow covering the past 19 years. It's code name: Version 6 IMERG. NASA's IMERG -- the Integrated Multi-satellitE Retrievals for GPM -- combines information from whatever constellation of satellites are operating in Earth orbit at a given time, to estimate precipitation over the majority of the Earth's surface. This algorithm is particularly valuable over the majority of the Earth's surface that lacks precipitation-measuring instruments on...

NASA’s Precipitation Measurement Missions (PMM) have collected rain and snowfall from space for nearly 20 years, and for the first time in 2019, scientists can access PMM’s entire record as one data set. PMM includes two missions – the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM), which orbited Earth from 1997 to 2015, and its successor, the joint NASA-JAXA Global Precipitation Measurement mission (GPM), which has been collecting data since 2014. This year, however, the GPM project upgraded its data algorithms to calibrate and incorporate TRMM data into its release, giving researchers, modelers...

Due to NASA network policies the NASA Precipitation Processing System (PPS) will be transitioning from FTP to FTPS for access to download GPM and TRMM data. As a result of this change, users may need to update the methods they use to download data. Due to these changes users will no longer be able to access the PPS FTPS servers using a web browser, and will need to connect using either the command line or dedicated file transfer software. One piece of software that can be used to connect to the new FTPS servers is Filezilla, which is free and open source, and is available on Mac, Windows, and...

Download in high resolution from the NASA Goddard Scientific Visualization Studio GPM captured Dorian at 10:41 UTC (6:41 am EDT) on the 4th of September when the storm was moving north-northwest parallel to the coast of Florida about 90 miles due east of Daytona Beach. Three days earlier, Dorian had struck the northern Bahamas as one of the most powerful Category 5 hurricanes on record in the Atlantic with sustained winds of 185 mph. Weakening steering currents allowed the powerful storm to ravage the northern Bahamas for 2 full days. During this time, Dorian began to weaken due to its...

In addition to the powerful winds that have raked the northern Bahamas over the past few days, Hurricane Dorian’s slow motion has brought very heavy rainfall to the islands as well. Dorian first formed into a tropical depression on the 24th of August about 800 miles east southeast of Barbados in the Lesser Antilles from an area of low pressure; the depression was quickly upgraded to a minimal tropical storm and named Dorian by the National Hurricane Center (NHC) later in the day. As Dorian made its way westward under the influence of a high pressure ridge to the north, it was held in check...