Five years ago, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) launched the Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) Core Observatory as a joint satellite. Since then, the instruments on GPM have provided advanced measurements about rain and snow particles within clouds, Earth’s precipitation patterns, extreme weather and precipitation that affects communities around the world.
The International Charter “Space and Major Disasters” was activated on 7 July for a major flooding disaster which has hit Japan, the worst the country has experienced in 36 years.
In May 2017, a team of scientists from West Virginia University used satellites to monitor temperatures, water storage, precipitation and land in order to predict a cholera outbreak in Yemen. After processing the satellite data in algorithms, the team was able to come up with a prediction model and ultimately to identify the particular areas that were most at risk for an outbreak several weeks before the event took place.
NASA’s Global Precipitation Measurement mission has produced its first global map of rainfall and snowfall.
The GPM Core Observatory – launched one year ago on 27 February 2014, as a collaboration between NASA and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency – acts as the standard to unify precipitation measurements from a network of 12 satellites. The result is NASA's Integrated Multi-satellite Retrievals for GPM data product, called IMERG, which combines all of these data from 12 satellites into a single, seamless map.
The first set of data from the NASA/JAXA Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) mission is now available to the public.
NASA reported: "The data set consists of GPM Microwave Imager instrument observations, called brightness temperatures. Brightness temperatures are a measurement of naturally occurring energy radiated, in this case, by precipitation particles like raindrops or snowflakes. Other data sets, like the rain rate information, will be released later this summer."
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