GPM IMERG
Gov-Public
NASA's 30-minute, 0.1° global precipitation record — the highest time resolution of any satellite rainfall product.
CHIRPS
ActiveGauge-blended satellite rainfall at 0.05°, daily, since 1981 — the standard for drainage work in data-sparse regions.
by Climate Hazards Center, UC Santa Barbara
- Pricing
- Free
- License
- Free, no registration required
- Commercial use
- Permitted
- Ecosystem
- Google Earth Engine, Python, GDAL
- Platform
- Windows, macOS, Linux
About CHIRPS
CHIRPS (Climate Hazards InfraRed Precipitation with Station data), from UC Santa Barbara's Climate Hazards Center, blends infrared satellite imagery with in-situ station records into a 0.05° (~5km) quasi-global rainfall record spanning 1981 to near-present. It was built specifically for drought monitoring and food-security work in Africa, and that gauge-blending discipline makes it unusually trustworthy versus satellite-only products.
For H&H work anywhere gauge networks are thin, CHIRPS is often the first rainfall dataset to reach for — long enough for frequency analysis, fine enough for catchment-scale modelling, and free with no registration.
Where it fits in the workflow
TerrainCatchmentRainfallRunoffRoutingHydraulicsMappingReporting
Appears in collections
- Satellite Data for Hydrology & Water Engineering
The satellite and reanalysis datasets H&H engineers actually reach for — DEM to GRACE.
Alternatives to CHIRPS
Ranked by the topics, categories and workflow stages they share with CHIRPS.
PERSIANN-CDR
Free
A neural-network satellite rainfall climate data record, daily, 0.25°, purpose-built for long-term trend studies.
MSWEP
Freemium
Precipitation that optimally blends gauges, satellites and reanalysis at every grid cell — 3-hourly, 0.1°, global.
NOAA Weather and Climate Toolkit
Gov-Public
Free viewer and exporter for NEXRAD radar, satellite and climate data — out to GeoTIFF, Shapefile and NetCDF.
wradlib
Open Source
The open library for weather-radar rainfall processing — from raw volumes to engineering-ready rainfall fields.
NASA Earthdata Search
Gov-Public
The unified search portal across every NASA Earth-observation archive — SRTM, MODIS, SMAP, GPM, GRACE and more.