The Washington, DC area is about to get hit with a record-level snow storm, with attendant disruptions to work schedules, travel, communications, and power. If you find that the TMPA-RT products drop out, it is safe to assume that some combination of these effects is preventing production, and we will work to restore service when that is possible.

The GPM core observatory satellite saw a tropical cyclone developing in the South Indian Ocean east of Madagascar on January 21, 2016 at 0146 UTC. GPM's Microwave Imager (GMI) and Dual-frequency Precipitation Radar (DPR) measured precipitation in the potential tropical cyclone. The most intense showers were shown by the GMI instrument to be dropping rain at a rate of over 71 mm (2.8 inches) per hour in strong storms to the northeast of the tropical low's center of circulation. GPM's radar (DPR) viewed a swath of data to the west of the developing tropical cyclone center where rain was measured

Stormy weather moving in from the Pacific Ocean has frequently affected the Pacific Northwest over the past week. Moisture moving over the Washington and Oregon coasts has been transformed into snow at colder and higher elevations in the Cascades. Coincidentally a field campaign called The Olympic Mountain Experiment (OLYMPEX) is being led by NASA in the Olympic Peninsula of Washington State from November 2015 through February 2016. An analysis of precipitation that occurred in the Pacific Northwest during the period from January 12-19, 2016 is shown here. This precipitation analysis from

Alex is a rare storm indeed. Alex officially became a hurricane yesterday at 11:00 am Atlantic Standard Time (AST) with maximum sustained winds estimated at 85 mph by the National Hurricane Center (NHC), making it the earliest hurricane to form in the Atlantic since 1938, when the first storm of the season became a hurricane on the 4th of January. As with Alex, that storm too originated from an extratropical low pressure center. The last hurricane to occur in January was Hurricane Alice in 1955, but Alice had already become a hurricane in the year before at the end of December and survived