TRMM Gridded Text Products

Abstract

NASA's Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) has many products that contain instantaneous or gridded rain rates often among many other parameters. However, these products because of their completeness can often seem intimidating to users just desiring surface rain rates. For example one of the gridded monthly products contains well over 200 parameters. It is clear that if only rain rates are desired, this many parameters might prove intimidating. In addition, for many good reasons these products are archived and currently distributed in HDF format. This also can be an inhibiting factor in using TRMM rain rates. To provide a simple format and isolate just the rain rates from the many other parameters, the TRMM product created a series of gridded products in ASCII text format. This paper describes the various text rain rate products produced. It provides detailed information about parameters and how they are calculated. It also gives detailed format information. These products are used in a number of applications with the TRMM processing system. The products are produced from the swath instantaneous rain rates and contain information from the three major TRMM instruments: radar, radiometer, and combined. They are simple to use, human readable, and small for downloading.