Global Precipitation Measurement
- Dual -frequency Precipitation Radar (DPR)
- GPM Microwave Image (GMI )
Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM ) is an Earth observation satellite jointly developed by the Japanese space agency JAXA and the U.S. NASA.
He was born on February 27, 2014 at 18:37 UTC with a Japanese H-IIA rocket from Tanegashima Space Center along with seven other much smaller satellites ( Ginrei, INVADAR, KSAT -2, OPUSAT, STARS II, TeikyoSat -3 and ITF -1) placed in a low earth orbit.
The satellite is equipped with a microwave camera ( GPM Microwave Imager = GMI) and a dual -frequency radar instrument (Dual -frequency Precipitation Radar = DPR) and to observe snowfall around the globe, cloud formations, as well as rain and. This involves, among other things, to predicting catastrophic droughts. The GMI recorded rainfall intensities and horizontal pattern, while the DPR provides insights into the three-dimensional structure of particles. Together, these instruments form a database of measurements that can be compared and combined with observations of other satellites in the microwave range in order to obtain a record of the global precipitate. Every three hours to present a new global picture of the situation. It has a design life of three years.
Instruments
The GMI was developed by Ball Aerospace and Technology Corporation on behalf of NASA. To operate in channels 13 of 10 GHz to 183 GHz, is equipped with a 1.2 m antenna and having a swath width of 904 km.
The DPR provides three-dimensional information about precipitation of particles on the energy reflected by these particles at different heights within the cloud. The use of two frequencies allows the radar to infer the sizes of precipitation particles and provide insight into the physical properties of a storm. The sampling in the Ka band ( 35.5 GHz) sweeps over the Earth's surface on an area of 125 km wide and lies within the scanning of the Ku-band frequency ( 13.6 GHz) of 254 km in width. The instrument was developed by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency ( JAXA ) and the Japanese National Institute of Information and Communications Technology ( NICT ) developed and built.