NASA | A Week in the Life of Rain

Rain, snow, hail, ice, and every slushy mix in between make up the precipitation that touches everyone on our planet. But not all places rain equally. Precipitation falls differently in different parts of the world, as you see in NASA's new video that captures every shower, every snow storm and every hurricane from August 4 to August 14, 2014. The GPM Core Observatory, co-led by NASA and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), was launched on Feb 27, 2014, and provides advanced instruments that can see rain and falling snow all the way through the atmosphere. This Core Observatory serves as the reference standard to unite preciptiation observations from a dozen satellites, which together produce the most detailed world-wide view of everything from light rain to heavy rain and, for the first time, falling snow. Scientists merged data from 12 precipitation satellites into a single seamless map called the Integrated Multi-satellite Retrievals for Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM), or IMERG. Every 30 minutes, IMERG generates a new global map with a resolution of 10 kilometers by 10 km (6.2 miles by 6.2 mi), about the size of a small suburb. These comprehensive maps allow scientists to observe changes in precipitation patterns across 87 percent of the globe and through time.

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[softypapa]

Videos like this are a moving experience to watch. Thank you for your hard work and effort in bringing this to us. :-)

[doodelay]

Humans, the only species to have ever cracked the riddle of the rainfall. Well done you intelligent apes, well done.

[ECsponger]

This is fucking awesome. Science is fucking awesome.

[germanospina]

Muy importante el video, ya que se observa el cambio climatico.

[cewaffles]

Would love to see a months worth or more, maybe a year's worth of these.

[ozwald]

NASA should make the data from these satellites available to everyone

[Vicvines]

You guys need to do stuff with Google Earth so we can see overlays like this.

[AngryKittens]

So it wasn't the butterfly's fault after all? :P

[Lastindependentthinker]

So this wasn't in real time? how do we utilize this data/technology and turn it into a weather app that can workout my position and the direction the rain is traveling. then give me 1 hours notice or so that it is going to rain on me soon, or my location and ruin my picnic or whatever. anything less than 1 hour is kind of pointless as I may as well look up and say it's going to rain? or it's too late. On the human scale if it's raining 10 kilometers away I don't care unless i'm traveling there. Which would be better than watching the weather on the news the night before where they say "Possible Chances of Showers" Which is total guess work or speculation....

[rochelimit]

Don't really wanna say this but NASA is far better than ESO in breakthrough science in my opinion.

[roidroid]

It's troubling to talk about "popcorn" effects visible in the data.  This is very low frame-rate data, it's hard to tell stuttering video from any ACTUAL throbbing in the data.  When i see these effects i just assume the former.