The Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) mission's Precipitation Processing System at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, has released the Level 2 GPM Microwave Imager (GMI) data to the public. The data set includes precipitation rates, which show how much rain and snowfall accumulate over a given time period.

This Level 2 data set of falling rain and snow is computed from Level 1 brightness temperature observations from GMI, the basic measurement made by the instrument of naturally occurring energy radiated, in this case, by precipitation particles (raindrops or snowflakes). Level 1 data were released on June 16. 

Precipitation rates are estimated using the Goddard Profiling algorithm (GPROF14). The Level 2 data set's formal name is GPROF-GMI.

Current and future data sets are available to registered users from NASA Goddard's Precipitation Processing Center website at: http://pps.gsfc.nasa.gov/. To information on registering for this site, visit: http://registration.pps.eosdis.nasa.gov/registration/.

The complete schedule of public data releases is available at: http://pmm.nasa.gov/mission-updates/gpm-news/gpm-data-release-schedule-announced