Passive Microwave Hail Climatology Satellite Gridded Estimates

Gridded estimates of annual severe hailstorm frequency derived from satellite-borne passive microwave imagery. The dataset spans from January 1, 1998, through March 31, 2025, with a specific product ending on September 30, 2014 due to the TRMM mission conclusion. These data products are produced by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration for weather and climatological research.

Use Cases

• Analyzing long-term trends in severe hail occurrence using annual frequency grids.
• Validating hail prediction models with satellite-retrieved climatology data.
• Assessing regional hail risk for insurance and infrastructure planning using geospatial estimates.
• Studying the impact of the TRMM mission end on hail data continuity by comparing pre- and post-2014 records.
• Creating visual hazard maps for emergency preparedness using the provided PNG format climatology maps.

Strengths

• Provides a long temporal record of over 27 years, from 1998 to 2025.
• Data is derived from satellite-borne passive microwave imagery, offering a consistent, global observation method.
• Includes multiple data formats (netCDF-3, PNG) for both analysis and visualization.

Limitations

• Specific row counts, column names, and dataset size are not provided by any source.
• Sources conflict on the end date of the overall dataset, with one listing March 2023 and others March 2025.
• One core product (TRMM_HailClimatology) has a truncated time series, ending in September 2014.

Provenance

Source

National Aeronautics and Space Administration

Collection Method

Retrieved from satellite-borne passive microwave imagery.

Time Range

1998-01-01 to 2025-03-31

Freshness

Most recently updated on March 12, 2026, according to datagov.

Geography

Global (gridded)