Infra red (IR) images from the GOES geostationary satellite have provided continuous information regarding stratiform rainfall distributions and lightning has been shown to be proportional to convective rainfall. Lightning emits radio noise between 5 and 15 kHz, known as sferics, that propagates over thousands of km. A network of five ground based radio receivers situated along the U.S. east coast and Puerto Rico has monitored sferics distributions more or less continuously since July 1997. Such sferics distributions are available from central Brazil to the Canadian Northwest Territory.
While neither sferics nor IR measurements are directly related to rainfall, features of IR brightness temperature patterns and sferics distributions were empirically tuned to more definitive, but sparse, coincident rainfall distributions derived from spaceborne microwave measurements. Those tuned rainfall retrievals are validated with respect to rainfall recorded by a network of 29 gauges in a 50 x 50 km region centered on the Panama Canal. Daily distributions of rainfall over Central and South America will be presented.