Global Precipitation Mission Visualization Tool

The Global Precipitation Mission (GPM) software provides graphic visualization tools that enable easy comparison of ground- and space-based radar observations. It was initially designed to compare ground radar reflectivity from operational, ground-based, S- and C-band meteorological radars with comparable measurements from the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) satellite's precipitation radar instrument. This design is also applicable to other groundbased and space-based radars, and allows both ground- and space-based radar data to be compared for validation purposes. The tool creates an operational system that routinely performs several steps. It ingests satellite radar data (precipitation radar data from TRMM) and groundbased meteorological radar data from a number of sources. Principally, the ground radar data comes from national networks of weather radars (see figure). The data ingested by the visualization tool must conform to the data formats used in GPM Validation Network Geometry-matched data product generation. The software also performs match-ups of the radar volume data for the ground- and space-based data, as well as statistical and graphical analysis (including two-dimensional graphical displays) on the match-up data. The visualization tool software is written in IDL, and can be operated either in the IDL development environment or as a stand-alone executable function.