CHIRPS
Free
Gauge-blended satellite rainfall at 0.05°, daily, since 1981 — the standard for drainage work in data-sparse regions.
GPM IMERG
ActiveNASA's 30-minute, 0.1° global precipitation record — the highest time resolution of any satellite rainfall product.
by NASA / JAXA
- Pricing
- Gov-Public
- License
- US Government (public domain)
- Commercial use
- Permitted
- Ecosystem
- Google Earth Engine, Python, GDAL
- Platform
- Windows, macOS, Linux
About GPM IMERG
IMERG (Integrated Multi-satellitE Retrievals for GPM) merges the GPM satellite constellation's passive microwave and infrared observations into a global precipitation grid at 0.1° and half-hourly resolution, with a continuous record extending back to 1998 by splicing in the earlier TRMM mission. Early and Late runs arrive within hours for near-real-time monitoring; the Final run adds gauge correction weeks later for analysis-grade accuracy.
Its temporal resolution makes it the satellite product of choice for flash-flood and urban-drainage work, where CHIRPS's daily timestep is too coarse — at the cost of finer spatial detail than CHIRPS's gauge-anchored 0.05° grid.
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 GPM IMERG
Ranked by the topics, categories and workflow stages they share with GPM IMERG.
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.