JAXA Climate Rainfall Watch

A need to monitor precipitation extremes from space is widely recognized, especially for regions where ground-based observations are limited or unavailable. The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) has developed the Global Satellite Mapping of Precipitation (GSMaP) in the Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) mission. The JAXA participated in the Space-based Weather and Climate Extremes Monitoring (SWCEM) of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) by providing the GSMaP Near-real-time Rainfall Product. Based upon JAXA’s experiences in the SWCEM, Earth Observation Research Center (EORC) in the JAXA is operating a homepage “JAXA Climate Rainfall Watch”, which provides information about extreme heavy rainfall and drought over the world using the GSMaP data. You can easily monitor global extreme weather and climate by displaying accumulated rainfall in some temporal scale (daily, pentad, weekly, 10-days and monthly), indices related to extreme heavy rainfall (percentiles) and drought (Standardized Precipitation Index; SPI). An annoucement from the JAXA is avaialble from the following (https://www.eorc.jaxa.jp/en/news/2020/nw200309.html).