Over the past several years, one of the key activities of the WMO/Coordination Group for Meteorological Satellites (CGMS)/International Precipitation Working Group (IPWG) has been the development of international ground precipitation analyses from a variety of climate regimes. By defining a “standard validation template” that is utilized at the various locations (presently, the United States, Australia, Western Europe, South America and Japan; several other regions are under consideration including South Africa, India and China), these data can then be used to evaluate the performance of a wide-array of satellite based precipitation analyses, most commonly on a 24-hr time scale. More recently, the IPWG has focused on the evaluation of shorter duration rainfall events through a program known as PERHPP – Program to Evaluate High Resolution Precipitation Products.

Through both of these activities, the IPWG has helped to advance the state of the art of satellite precipitation retrievals and has provided users of the products valuable information. It is the purpose of this paper to highlight the IPWG validation activities and provide the audience with the most recent plans/outcome of the 4th Workshop of the IPWG which is being held in Beijing, China in October 2008.