Overview of GPM Missions's Ground Validation Program

An important element of the internationally structured Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) mission will be its ground validation research program. Within the last year, the initial architecture of this program has taken shape. This talk will describe that architecture, both in terms of the international program and in terms of the separate regional programs of the principle participating space agencies, i.e., ESA, JAXA, and NASA. There are three overriding goals being addressed in the planning of this program; (1) establishing various new, challenging and important scientific research goals vis-a-vis current ground validation programs supporting satellite retrieval of precipitation; (2) designing the program as an international partnership which operates, out of necessity, heterogeneous sites in terms of their respective observational foci and science thrusts, but anneals itself in terms of achieving a few overarching scientific objectives; and (3) developing a well-designed protocol that allows specific sites or site networks, at their choosing, to operate in a 'supersite' mode - defined as the capability to routinely transmit GV information at low latency to GPM's Precipitation Processing System (PPS). (The PPS is being designed as GPM's data information system, a distributed data system with main centers at the Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) within NASA, the Earth Observation Research Center (EORC) within JAXA, and a TBD facility to be identified by the ESA s ESTEC facility in Noordwijk.)