An El Niño that began to form last fall has matured and is now fully entrenched across the Pacific. Changes in sea surface temperatures, or SSTs, brought about by an El Niño affect the atmosphere, resulting in distinctive changes in the rainfall pattern across the Pacific Basin. These changes show up as anomalies or deviations in NASA’s analysis of climatological rainfall. This map shows sea surface temperature (SST) anomalies for the Pacific Basin, shown as degrees Celsius above or below average. Credit: NOAA Climate Prediction Center. In a typical El Niño, warmer than average SSTs off of the...

Spring is severe storms season here in the US, but not everyone has NEXRAD radar coverage; however, NASA’s TRMM and GPM satellites with their onboard radars have made it possible to search the entire global Tropics and midlatitudes and systematically identify areas where there are strong to intense thunderstorms. Researchers now headed by Dr. Chuntao Liu at Texas A&M University have built a comprehensive database of “precipitation features” based on regions of contiguous radar echoes from first the TRMM and now the GPM satellite. These precipitation features can then be mined to locate areas...