The GLOBE Program

The GLOBE Program is a worldwide community of students, teachers, scientists and citizens working together to better understand, sustain and improve Earth's environment at local, regional and global scales. There are many ways to get involved with helping us make observations which can be used to improve life on our home planet. We invite you to participate in these two on-going projects that integrate making observations with the free GLOBE Observer app. Join us by “Telling Your Tree Story” and “Telling Your Water Story”

The GLOBE Precipitation Protocol

The GLOBE Precipitation Protocol enables students, teachers, and scientists to use rain gauges and/or automated weather stations to collect precipitation measurements from locations around the world.

The Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) mission is an international collaboration that uses multiple satellites orbiting Earth to collect rain, snow and other precipitation data worldwide every three hours.  GPM recently released the latest version of their “IMERG” multi-satellite product,  which provides global estimates of Earth's rain and snowfall updated every half hour. 

Have you ever wondered how your measurements compare to those taken by Earth observing satellites like GPM? By following these simple directions, you can compare and contrast your monthly precipitation data to that of NASA's Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) mission.

View the full activity instructions here (.pdf)

We would love to see your comparisons! If you email your completed GPM and GLOBE comparison spreadsheet that includes at least three months of data to dorian.w.janney@nasa.gov, you will receive a digital certificate from the GPM mission.

Global precipitation map generated by the GPM IMERG data product. Click here to view an animation of the latest 7 days of rainfall.