TRMM Ground Validation Radar Site Rain Type Map L2 1 hour 2 km V7 (TRMM_2A54UW) at GES DISC

This dataset is part of the University of Washington TRMM Ground Validation products.

Instantaneous convective-stratiform cartesian grid based on baseUW. Values are 0 (no echo), 1 (stratiform), and 2 (convective). Min range is 17 km, max range is 150 km. Note that in the netCDF files, "alt" (altitude) is assigned the elevation angle of the lowest sweep (which is used to create baseUW) and "z_spacing" has no meaning.

A key component of the TRMM project is the Ground Validation (GV) effort which consists of collecting data from ground-based radar, rain gauges and disdrometers. The data is quality-controlled, and then validation products are produced for comparison with TRMM satellite products.

The four primary GV sites are:

+ Darwin, Australia;
+ Houston, Texas;
+ Kwajalein, Republic of the Marshall Islands;
+ Melbourne, Florida.

A significant effort is also being supported at NASA Wallops Flight Facility (WFF) and vicinity to provide high quality, long-term measurements of rain rates (via a network of rain gauges collocated with National Weather Service gauges), as well as drop size distributions (DSD) using a variety of instruments, including impact-type Joss Waldvogel, laser-optical Parsivel, as well as two-dimensional video disdrometers. DSD measurements are also being collected at Melbourne and Kwajalein using Joss-Waldvogel disdrometers.