The main difference between the IMERG Early and Late Run is that Early only has forward propagation (which basically amounts to extrapolation forward in time), while the Late has both forward and backward propagation (allowing interpolation). As well, the additional 10 hours of latency allows lagging data transmissions to make it into the Late run, even if they were not available for the Early (see below).

There are two possible factors which contribute to differences in the IMERG Late Run and Final Run datasets:

GPM data products can be divided into two groups (near real-time and production) depending on how soon they are created after the satellite collects the observations. For applications such as weather, flood, and crop forecasting that need precipitation estimates as soon as possible, near real-time data products are most appropriate. For all other applications, production data products are generally the best data sets to use because additional or improved inputs are used to increase accuracy.

The GPM Core Observatory satellite launched on February 27th 2014 at 1:37pm EST. It launched from Tanegashima Space Center, Japan, on a Japanese HII-A rocket provided by JAXA. 

Learn more about GPM's launch.