From December 1997 to April 2015, the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) satellite has collected more than one hundred million snapshots of various precipitation systems, or so-called precipitation features, in tropics and subtropics. Using these precipitation features, the properties of different types of precipitation systems and their roles in the global water and latent heat budget in the tropics and subtropics have been studied extensively. Since the launch in February 2014, the Global Precipitation Mission (GPM) core satellite, the successor of TRMM, has provided more than four-year space borne precipitation radar observations covering more than 90% of the Earth. With a similar approach, twenty-three million precipitation features have been defined by grouping the contiguous precipitation areas indicated by precipitation radar. This presentation briefly reviews what we have learned from more than 17-year TRMM observations during the past decades, and introduces exciting findings from the new GPM observations. The topics include seasonal, diurnal variations of global precipitation, deep convection, latent heating, as well as severe weather monitoring with GPM constellation satellites.

About the Speaker:

Dr. Chuntao Liu is an Associate Professor of Atmospheric Sciences in the Department of Physical and Environmental Sciences and has been employed at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi since 2013. His primary research interests are in the areas of satellite remote sensing of global precipitation, cloud, and severe weather events, with an emphasis on the cloud object recognition in space borne radar and radiometer observations. Chuntao completed his Ph.D. in atmospheric sciences at the University of Wyoming in 2003, where he also stationed at McMurDo, Antarctic monitoring the stratospheric ozone with balloons for two seasons. Then he joined University of Utah working on the global precipitation and severe weather events using NASA satellites. Currently Chuntao maintains an instrument measuring the fair-weather electric field at Barrow, Alaska, and is a science team member of NASA precipitation science mission.
                   
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