Research and Development

2017.05.10 Wed

Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) Products (Version 5) Release

JAXA and NASA have started to provide a new version (Version 5) of Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) standard products. The following GPM products were started updating to product version 5 (V05A) from May 9th, 2017.The data from March 2014 will be reprocessed.

GPM satellite/DPR L1~L3 ver. 05A
GPM satellite/GMI L1~L3 ver.05A
GPM satellite/DPR-GMI(Comb) L2~L3 ver.05A
GPM constellation satellites/MWS L1C ver.05A

GPM Version 5 products are available from G-Portal.

There are following improvements in DPR Version 5 from Version 4.
1) Changes of DPR calibration coefficients, corresponding to orbital calibration results obtained during the prime mission period.
2) Reflecting the findings obtained in the DPR algorithms, to make more accurate precipitation estimation based upon the dual-frequency information of the DPR.

Particularly for 2), Ku & Ka single products will become more consistent with the dual-frequency product, by introducing the rain drop size distribution (DSD) database derived from the dual-frequency product as initial values. Also, with the accumulation of DPR data and advanced research and development, it became possible to introduce a method that utilizes dual-frequency information more highly, new variables will be added for precipitation particle information such as hail and ice (flagHeavyIcePrecip) and surface snowfall diagnosis (flagSurfaceSnowfall) (Fig. 1).

Please see the following URL for more details.
http://www.eorc.jaxa.jp/GPM/doc/product_info_e.htm

And please see the following URL for the improvements of GMI, DPR-GMI(Comb), and GPM constellation satellites/MWS L1C products.
https://pps.gsfc.nasa.gov/GPMprelimdocs.html

The version 5 of GPM/DPR Spectral Latent Heating (SLH) and Convective Stratiform Heating (CSH) will be released after July. So GPM/DPR SLH and CSH processing and delivery with version 4 will be suspended until version 5 is released.

flagSurfaceSnowfall (surface snowfall diagnostic information) in the DPR-Level 2 product (left figure) on January 18, 2016 snowfall case, and classification of the surface precipitation intensity (blue or red) based on flagSurfaceSnowfall & Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA)’s ground observation (AMeDAS) (symbol) (right figure). It turns out that flagSurfaceSnowfall corresponds well with the classification in the AMeDAS.

Figure 1: flagSurfaceSnowfall (surface snowfall diagnostic information) in the DPR-Level 2 product (left figure) on January 18, 2016 snowfall case, and classification of the surface precipitation intensity (blue or red) based on flagSurfaceSnowfall & Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA)’s ground observation (AMeDAS) (symbol) (right figure). It turns out that flagSurfaceSnowfall corresponds well with the classification in the AMeDAS.

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