In addition to destructive winds measured at 81 mph (70 kts) a powerful winter storm called Desmond dropped record rainfall in northwest England over the past weekend. Desmond's unusually heavy rainfall resulted in wide spread damaging floods. Data from NASA's Integrated Multi-satellitE Retrievals for GPM (IMERG) were used to estimate rainfall for the period from November 30 to December 7, 2015. This analysis found that some rainfall near the Irish Sea measured over 392 mm (~15.4 inches) during this period. As much as 304 mm (~12 inches) of rain were reported to have fallen in only 24 hours.

The Integrated Multi-satellitE Retrievals for GPM (IMERG) creates a merged precipitation product from the GPM constellation of satellites. These satellites include DMSPs from the U.S. Department of Defense, GCOM-W from the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), Megha-Tropiques from the Centre National D’etudies Spatiales (CNES) and Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO), NOAA series from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), Suomi-NPP from NOAA-NASA, and MetOps from the European Organization for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites (EUMETSAT). All of the instruments (radiometers) onboard the constellation partners are inter-calibrated with information from the GPM Core Observatory’s GPM Microwave Imager (GMI) and Dual-frequency Precipitation Radar (DPR).