GPM Ground Validation Precipitation Data from Wallops Flight Facility

May 6, 2013 through October 9, 2014 precipitation data collected from six Autonomous Parsivel Unit disdrometers at NASA's Wallops Flight Facility in support of the Global Precipitation Mission. The dataset includes measurements of precipitation amount, rate, reflectivity, liquid water content, drop diameter, and drop concentration. It was produced by NASA using optical laser-disdrometer technology developed by OTT and the University of Alabama.

Use Cases

• Validating satellite precipitation retrievals from the GPM mission using ground-based measurements of precipitation rate and amount.
• Analyzing drop size distribution and hydrometeor characteristics using columns for drop diameter and drop concentration.
• Studying the relationship between liquid water content and radar reflectivity in the Rayleigh regime.
• Calibrating disdrometer-based precipitation measurement systems against a known, multi-unit deployment.

Strengths

• Data sourced from six co-located sensor units, providing spatial consistency checks.
• Covers a 17-month time range from May 2013 to October 2014 for longitudinal analysis.
• Provides direct, ground-truth measurements of key precipitation parameters like drop diameter and concentration.

Limitations

• Specific column names, row counts, and dataset size are not provided by any source.
• Sources conflict on the last update date: datagov lists 2026-03-13 (likely a metadata error), while nasa_earthdata lists 2014-10-08.
• Data format is listed as ASCII, but available file formats are noted as BIN, ISO, PDF, creating ambiguity.

Provenance

Source

National Aeronautics and Space Administration

Collection Method

Collected from six Autonomous Parsivel Unit (APU) optical laser-disdrometers at Wallops Flight Facility.

Time Range

May 6, 2013 through October 9, 2014

Freshness

2014-10-08 05:30:00

Geography

Wallops Flight Facility, Virginia, USA