Applications

USDA Foreign Agricultural Service Crop Explorer

"TRMM and Other Data" estimates in real time was developed to apply new concepts in merging quasi-global precipitation estimates and to take advantage of the increasing availability of near real time data. The DISC is serving this data to The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Foreign Agricultural Service (USDA-FAS) to use in monitoring precipitation around the world. This project is unique, being the first of its kind to utilize near-real time global satellite precipitation data in an operational manner to quickly locate regional weather events and improve crop production estimates.

The Tropical Rainfall Diurnal Cycle

TRMM has made it possible to monitor global tropical rainfall diurnal patterns and their intensities, an issue of critical importance to many nations which depend on knowledge of rainfall variability to prepare for possible secondary effects of large swings in rainfall rates. The diurnal cycle of precipitation was derived from the combined (PR, TMI) Rainfall Profile algorithm (2B31).

TRMM Diurnal Cycle (3G68) Animations

Animations depicting the diurnal variation of annual precipitation from three TRMM algorithms.

Tropical Rainfall Potential (TRaP)

The Satellite Analysis Branch (SAB) of NOAA's National Environmental Satellite, Data, and Information Service produces an experimental graphical representation of the forecast Tropical Rainfall Potential (TRaP), http://www.ssd.noaa.gov/PS/TROP/trap-img.html, for any tropical system in the Western Hemisphere and many in the Eastern Hemisphere. In the TRaP system, the latest rainfall estimates for tropical storms derived from SSM/I, AMSU, or TRMM are used to initialize a simple algorithm for estimating cumulative rainfall for those storms predicted to hit land within 24 hours and performing an extrapolation of the rain rate values. The TRMM rainfall estimates are useful because they are the highest resolution of all the POES and the dynamic range of the rainfall estimates is greater than AMSU or SSM/I.

Famine Early Warning System Network (FEWS NET)

High resolution data from the TRMM Microwave Imager (TMI) are used by FEWS NET, a partnership of U.S. agencies with environmental monitoring expertise and several African regional early warning groups, in support of its mission to predict and ameliorate famine in seventeen drought-prone African states.