GPM

Rainfall was scarce across much of the country in the month of September, pushing the eastern and southern thirds of the country into drought conditions. IMERG, the Integrated Multi-satellitE Retrievals for GPM, is a unified satellite precipitation product produced by NASA to estimate surface precipitation over most of the globe.

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...

A long precipitation data set like the new GPM IMERG V06 product is valuable for many applications and for decision-making. Accurate and reliable precipitation records are not only crucial to understanding trends and variability but also for water management resources and food security, ecological management, and weather, climate and hydrological forecasting. Here we present a few highlights showcasing how GPM IMERG is helping a variety of end users make decisions that will benefit society for years to come. GPM IMERG Data Used for Wind Energy Map of average precipitation in north-central...

Typhoon Hagibis, a once powerful super typhoon, struck the main Japanese island of Honshu over the weekend, bringing very heavy rains and widespread flooding. Hagibis formed into a tropical storm on the 5th of October from a tropical depression that originated from a westward moving tropical wave north of the Marshall Islands. At first, Hagibis strengthened steadily becoming a typhoon about 24 hours after becoming a tropical storm. But, then on the 7th, Hagibis underwent a remarkable rapid intensification cycle and quickly intensified into a super typhoon with sustained winds estimated at 160 mph by the Joint Typhoon Warning Center (JTWC) less than 24 hours after becoming a minimal typhoon.

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...

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...

Download in high resolution from the NASA Goddard Scientific Visualization Studio. The NASA / JAXA Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) Core Observatory flew over Hurricane Dorian on September 1st (5:22pm ET / 21:22 UTC) as the storm was directly over Abaco Island in The Bahamas. The satellite captured data on rainfall rates within the storm as it flew over using its Dual-frequency Precipitation Radar (DPR) and GPM Microwave Imager (GMI). In this animation the multi-satellite GPM IMERG product is shown first to illustrate rainfall rates prior to the overpass. When the camera zooms in data...

UPDATE 9/9/19: On Monday morning, September 9, Hurricane Dorian was a post-tropical storm after a mid-latitude weather front and cold seas had altered its tropical characteristics over the weekend. On Saturday and Sunday, Hurricane Dorian struck eastern Canada, causing wind damage and bringing heavy rainfall. According to the Associated Press, a peak of 400,000 people were without power in Nova Scotia, Canada, because of Dorian. This graphic shows precipitation that fell during the almost two-week period from August 27 to the early hours of September 9. The near-realtime rain estimates come...