How much it rained over the surface (AMSR-E/Aqua) — AE_Rain

In plain English

What it measures. How much rain or snow was falling at the surface at the moment of measurement, plus the precipitation type, over ice- and snow-free land and ocean at roughly 5-10 kilometer detail.

How it's made. Calculated from AMSR-E microwave brightness measurements aboard NASA's Aqua satellite using a precipitation-profiling algorithm.

How & where you'd use it. Gives near-instant snapshots of where it was raining, useful for studying storms, the water cycle and regional precipitation patterns.

What's measured

ATMOSPHERE › CLOUDS › CLOUD MICROPHYSICS › CLOUD LIQUID WATER/ICEATMOSPHERE › PRECIPITATION › SOLID PRECIPITATION › CONVECTIVE SURFACE PRECIPITATION RATEATMOSPHERE › PRECIPITATION › LIQUID PRECIPITATION › LIQUID SURFACE PRECIPITATION RATEATMOSPHERE › PRECIPITATION › PRECIPITATION RATEATMOSPHERE › PRECIPITATION › TOTAL SURFACE PRECIPITATION RATE

Coverage & cadence

Time span2002-06-01 → 2011-10-04
Measured byAqua (AMSR-E)
Processing levelLevel 2B
Spatial extent-180, -89.24, 180, 89.24
FormatsHDF-EOS5
StatusCOMPLETE

What you can do with it

Map air pollutants — NO₂, aerosols, ozone
Track greenhouse gases and Earth's energy budget
Feed weather and air-quality analysis

Official description

The AMSR-E/Aqua Level-2B precipitation product includes instantaneous surface precipitation rate and type over ice-free/snow-free land and ocean between 89.24 degrees north and south latitudes at at 10 km spatial resolution along the track and 5 km spatial resolution along the scan. The data are generated by the GPROF 2017 algorithm using Version 4 of the AMSR-E Level-2A Brightness Temperatures.

Get the data

ae_rain_access.py

import earthaccess
earthaccess.login(strategy="netrc")          # free Earthdata Login

results = earthaccess.search_data(
    short_name="AE_Rain",
    version="4",
    bounding_box=(-122.5, 37.2, -121.8, 37.9),  # your area (W,S,E,N)
    temporal=("2024-01-01", "2024-12-31"),       # your dates
)
files = earthaccess.open(results)   # stream straight from NSIDC_CPRD

Browsing CMR needs no login. Downloading or streaming bytes needs a free Earthdata Login + the earthaccess package.

Official links

Search and order NASA Earth Science data using spatial and temporal filters. Reformatting, reprojecting, and subsetting options are available for some data sets. GET DATA
Quickly download a few files using a web browser, or access data through a command-line utility such as WGET. GET DATA
A Python library to search and access NASA Earth science data with just a few lines of code GET DATA
Find more data access options and help resources. VIEW RELATED INFORMATION
AMSR-E/Aqua L2B Global Swath Surface Precipitation GSFC Profiling Algorithm, Version 4 User Guide VIEW RELATED INFORMATION
Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) Mission ATBD (GPROF2017 Version 1) VIEW RELATED INFORMATION