The GPM Combined Radar-Radiometer Algorithm performs two basic functions: first, it provides, in principle, the most accurate, high resolution estimates of surface rainfall rate and precipitation vertical distributions that can be achieved from a spaceborne platform, and it is therefore valuable for applications where information regarding instantaneous storm structure are vital.

The Level-3 radar products provide daily and monthly global statistics of the Level-2 Ku, Ka and DPR products on a latitude-longitude grid. In version 7 (V07), the organization of the products has changed with the highest-level categorization into FS (full swath), MS (matched or inner swath) and HS (high sensitivity) swath products. The next level of division is into high and low spatial resolution grids that are defined such that the low-resolution grid (G1) is 50×50 (lat×lon) while the high-resolution grid (G2) is 0.250× 0.250.

Latent heating (LH) cannot be measured directly with current techniques, including current remote sensing or in situ instruments, which explains why nearly all satellite retrieval schemes depend heavily on some type of cloud-resolving model or CRM (Tao et al. 2006, 2016). This is true for the current CSH algorithm (Tao et al. 2010).

Input: Combined 2BCMB (DPR + GMI) rainfall products