Overview of the Global Precipitation Measurement Mission (GPM) and Products
The NASA/JAXA Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) mission provides a variety of precipitation products, both directly from the GPM Core Observatory (GPM-CO) satellite and legacy Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) satellite, and by using the virtual constellation of precipitation-relevant satellites over the entire span of TRMM and GPM (starting in 1998). This work includes developing the U.S. GPM science team’s Integrated Multi-satellitE Retrievals for GPM (IMERG) merged precipitation product to use the radar-radiometer combined products from both the TRMM and GPM Core Observatories as calibrators in their respective eras. [The Japanese equivalent to IMERG is the Global Satellite Mapping of Precipitation, or GSMaP, dataset.] The complete IMERG record is retrospectively computed to provide a uniformly processed precipitation record from June 2000 (and eventually 1998) to the present at 0.1° half-hourly resolution, with full coverage in the latitude band 60°N-S and partial coverage at higher latitudes. The large-scale IMERG characteristics will be highlighted, and future plans in GPM will be reviewed.