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Did you know that NASA has satellites that are able to observe rain and snow all over the world? By following some easy directions, you can access NASA data to see how much precipitation was observed by satellites for your location any time from June 2000 to the present time!

NASA's Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) mission is an international satellite mission in collaboration with the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) that uses multiple satellites orbiting Earth to collect rain, snow and other precipitation data worldwide every thirty minutes. The GPM Core Observatory was launched from Japan in 2014. GPM is a follow up mission to the Tropical Rainfall Measurement Mission (TRMM), which launched in 1998. Thus, we have a detailed dataset of global precipitation observations that span almost two decades. These observations are available for most of the world.

In this activity, you will be guided to download monthly IMERG liquid accumulation equivalents which you can use to see how much precipitation was observed for your location. As the spatial resolution (the area covered by each data point) for IMERG data is an approximately 10-kilometer/~6 mile square region, the amount of precipitation that you will see from the data you get may differ from exactly how much fell at your specific location. It is pretty amazing, but true that it can rain heavily on one block, while right down the street the ground is still dry. Inaccuracies in processing the satellite observations can cause differences as well.