Overview Documents

This excerpt from the November 2014 edition of The Earth Observer provides a summary of the activities at the PMM Science Team Meeting which took place from August 4 - 7, 2014. The PMM program supports scientific research, algorithm development, and ground-based validation activities for the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) and the Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) Core Observatory that launched on February 27, 2014.

This 17 page flyer provides an overview of the GPM Mission. It describes the technologies used to measure precipitation and the missions scientific goals and societal applications.

Excerpt:

This excerpt from the March-April 2012 edition of The Earth Observer provides a summary of the activities at the PMM Science Team Meeting which took place from November 7 - 10 2011. The meeting brought together over 150 participants from 10 countries, and included representatives from NASA, JAXA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), universities, industry, and other international partner agencies.

Observations of the space-time variability of precipitation around the globe are imperative for understanding how climate change affects the global energy and water cycle (GWEC) in terms of changes in regional precipitation characteristics (type, frequency, intensity), as well as extreme hydrologic events, such as floods and droughts. The GWEC is driven by a host of complex processes and interactions, many of which are not yet well understood. Precipitation, which converts atmospheric water vapor into rain and snow, is a central element of the GWEC.

The validation of satellite products is classically defined as a ground-based observing strategy intended to assess whether satellite products meet their stated accuracy requirements and objectives. In the case of the Tropical Rainfall Measurement Mission (TRMM), this philosophy was translated to the quasi-continuous operation of four ground radar sites for which TRMM satellite sensor-based and ground-based rainfall products were compared. The findings from these four sites revealed that TRMM products generally met their stated objectives.

"Next-generation unified precipitation observations from space will refine global data using the latest satellite technology"

An article from the publication Meteorological Technology International. It provides an overview of the GPM mission and it's goals, as well as a description of the Helsinki ground validation field experiment.