NESDIS Operational Blended Rain Rate Product

The blended rain rate (RR) product is produced hourly by blending together recent rain rate retrievals from passive microwave instruments on eight polar-orbiting satellites, including POES NOAA-19, NOAA-20, MetOp-B, S-NPP, GCOM-W1, GPM, DMSP F17 and F18. The blended RR eliminates the bias between those data sets and provides a unified, meteorologically significant rain rate field for satellite analysts and weather forecasters.

The product is generated with the latest 10 hour worth of rain rate retrievals from multi-satellites/algorithms and output with a Mercator projection with 16-km resolution at the equator. The map is centered at the equator and 160°W. It has 1251 lines and 2501 elements, which covers the earth from about 71°N to 71°S. The cut line is at 20°E, which was chosen to emphasize ocean areas. The product is converted into McIDAS format for NESDIS satellite analysts and also subset into 4 AWIPS regions (Super National, Alaska, Hawaii, Puerto Rico) for NWS forecasters. As June of 2019, the global product is also available in netCDF4 format.

Details on the algorithm can be found at the Algorithm Description link.