Last Friday, February 27th, was the one-year anniversary of the launch of the Global Precipitation Measurement Mission Core Observatory, and coinciding with that event, released its first global map of rainfall and snowfall, covering the period from April 2014 to September 2014. The data map combines measurements from 12 satellites and the GPM Core Observatory, which serves to unify the data from all the satellites, like the lead violin in an orchestra tuning the rest of the instruments. 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 datacovers 87 percent of the globe and is updated every half hour.
"What this visualization shows so clearly is that all precipitation is interrelated all around the globe," said GPM Project Scientist Gail Skofronick-Jackson at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. "What people sometimes don't realize is how rain over their backyard in the U.S. then goes on to affect the people in Europe once the storms go across the Atlantic."
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