GPM

Camp managers and other local officials overseeing Rohingya refugee camps in Bangladesh are now incorporating NASA satellite observations into their decision making in order to reduce the risk to refugees from landslides and other natural hazards. Information like daily rain totals can help inform how to lay out refugee camps and store supplies. More than 740,000 Rohingya refugees have fled to Bangladesh since August 2017. Many of them have sought shelter in camps located in the hilly countryside, where landslide risk may be the greatest. Increasing this danger is Bangladesh’s intense monsoon season. Approximately 80 percent of Bangladesh's yearly rain falls in just five months, from June to October, bringing with it an increased risk of flash flooding and landslides.

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...