Improvements to the CMORPH High Resolution Global Precipitation Analyses

CMORPH is an analysis system that normalizes precipitation products from eight (at present) passive microwave sensors aboard various low orbit satellites, and integrates this information with infrared data from all available geostationary satellites. The resulting analyses are produced at ~ 8 km (at the equator) spatial scale and for time scales of 30 minutes. These analyses are produced in near real-time and have a history that dates back to December 2002. CMORPH analyses are presently used in NCEP's regional reanalysis, are a key product for the U. S. State Department's Famine Early Warning System, and for studies to document the diurnal cycle of precipitation world-wide and for NWP model validation. Many improvements to CMORPH have been made and are planned. Among these are a backward processing to 1998, inclusion of a decision model to determine when to use IR data directly to produce rainfall estimates, and when to use mid-level model winds instead of IR data to govern the motion of precipitating systems. A plan has been devised to incorporate rain gauge data directly into a version of CMORPH to produce a ‘research-quality', high time-space resolution data set of global precipitation.