Current Status and Future Outlook for NOAA/NESDIS Operational Precipitation Products

NOAA/NESDIS and its research partners at the University of Maryland's Cooperative Institute for Climate and Satellites (CICS) and Colorado State University's Cooperative Institute for Research in the Atmosphere (CIRA) are actively involved in the development, operational transition, validation and application of satellite derived precipitation products, primarily from low-earth and geostationary orbiting satellites. The satellites include the current GOES, DMSP, POES series and S-NPP; research missions such as Aqua, Megha-Tropiques, TRMM, GCOM-W and GPM; future satellites, including GOES-R and JPSS. Additionally, climate scale products have been developed that utilize the satellite era data to develop Climate Data Records and longer term precipitation reconstructions.

The precipitation data sets are used for a wide range of applications including short term forecasts and warnings (i.e., tropical rainfall potential, flash floods, etc.) and long-term climate studies (i.e., seasonal to interannual variability). It is the purpose of this overview paper to describe the current and future satellite precipitation activities at NOAA/NESDIS and set the stage for companion talks and posters on many of the specific products and data sets. Additionally, a future vision will be presented, which discusses the “convergence” of the retrieval algorithms and processing systems, as well as utilizing newer technologies such as the GOES Lightning Mapper and the recently launched GPM mission to improve the accuracy of the products.