DISCOVER, a NASA REASoN funded project provides carefully calibrated, long-term, climate quality ocean data products to the scientific community. These data can be confidently used to study the hydrologic cycle or global ocean weather patterns over the 20-years of SSM/I operation (1988 to 2008). One of the recommendations we make to our data users is to area rain flag the data when doing research or climate studies. Area rain flagging is crucial for climate wind analyses of satellite data. If not applied, rain climate signals will alias into the wind signal and create spurious trends in global and regional wind patterns. Here, we present what we mean when we say “area rain flagging” and we will demonstrate how using or not using this procedure results in different outcomes in climate research.