The "official" ocean precipitation retrieval algorithms for the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) Microwave Imager (TMI) and for the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer (AMSR) on the Adeos-2 satellite both utilize physical models and/or retrieval strategies developed in part at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The purpose of this paper is to highlight selected recent advances in 1) precipitation retrieval methodology, 2) the characterization of rain cloud physical properties relevant to microwave modeling and remote sensing, and 3) the validation and improvement of algorithm performance using simulated satellite swath data derived from mesoscale model output.