Operational applications of global precipitation measurement observations

Abstract

The NASA Global Precipitation Measurement Mission core satellite was launched in 2014, and the data observations provided by this mission are freely available to scientists around the globe in near real time. As part of the Early Adopter program, NASA’s Short-term Prediction Research and Transition (SPoRT) center has worked to provide these data to National Weather Service forecasters and hydrologists to determine its value within the operational environment. Over the course of three formal assessments with targeted users, forecasters have provided feedback to SPoRT on what types of data and value-added products are relevant to the offices’ primarily forecast challenges, how these GPM precipitation datasets can best be displayed, and what the products’ value is for specific weather-related phenomena. Forecasters in operational weather forecasting and hydrology valued using the precipitation estimate data, particularly in heavy rain events in which the impacts could be dangerous. These type of events include areal flooding from atmospheric river events, flash flooding from convective events, and assessing precipitation for mudslide risks. The gridded precipitation dataset from GPM, called IMERG, provided the most value to hydrologists. IMERG also provided some value to forecasters in retrospective cases, due to its longer latency. Snowfall-related products derived from GPM helped forecasters assess the intensity and location of falling snow, supplementing other datasets like ground-based radar. The passive microwave imagery, including RGB composites of different polarizations of single channels, helped tropical forecasters infer structure and intensity in tropical systems. The details and context of these results are provided herein to guide possible operational use of GPM’s datasets for forecasting and nowcasting.