TRMM Version 7 Near-Realtime Data Products

The TRMM data system has been providing near-realtime data products to the community since late 1999. While the TRMM project never had near-realtime production requirements, the science and applications communities had a great interest in receiving TRMM data as quickly as possible. As a result these NRT data are provided under a best-effort scenario but with the objective of having the swath data products available within three hours of data collection 90% of the time. In July of 2011 the Joint Precipitation Measurement Missions Science Team (JPST) authorized the reprocessing of TRMM mission data using the new version 7 algorithms. The reprocessing of the 14+ years of the mission was concluded within 30 days. Version 7 algorithms had substantial changes in the data product file formats both for data and metadata. In addition, the algorithms themselves had major modifications and improvements. The general approach to versioning up the NRT is to wait for the regular production algorithms to have run for a while and shake out any issues that might arise from the new version before updating the NRT products. Because of the substantial changes in data/metadata formats as well as the algorithm improvements themselves, the update of NRT to V7 followed an even more conservative path than usual. This was done to ensure that applications agencies and other users of the TRMM NRT would not be faces with short-timeframes for conversion to the new format. This paper will describe the process by which the TRMM NRT was updated to V7 and the V7 data products themselves.