The Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) mission for science and society Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society

The Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) Core Observatory (GPM CO) spacecraft is an advanced successor to TRMM, with additional channels on both the dual-frequency precipitation radar (DPR) and on the GPM Microwave Imager (GMI) with capabilities to sense light rain and falling snow (Hou et al. 2008, 2014). The GPM CO, also a NASA–JAXA partnership, was launched in February 2014 and currently operates in a non-sun-synchronous orbit with an inclination angle of 65°. This orbit allows the GPM CO to sample precipitation across all hours of the day from the tropics to the Arctic and Antarctic circles and for observing hurricanes and typhoons as they transition from the tropics to the midlatitudes. GPM expands TRMM’s reach not only in terms of global coverage, but also through sophisticated satellite instrumentation, the intercalibration of datasets from other microwave radiometers, coordinated merged precipitation datasets, reduced latency for delivering data products, simplified data access, expanded global ground-validation efforts, and integrated user applications. Because of the application focus of GPM, the public release of precipitation products is required in near–real time (1–5 h after the observations are downlinked to the ground stations).