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Global satellite rainfall maps (NOAA Hydro-Estimator)

NOAA Global Hydro Estimator (GHE) / Enterprise Rain Rate
atmosphere NOAA NOAA active
In plain English

What it measures. Worldwide maps that estimate how hard it is raining, stitched together from several weather satellites. It includes instantaneous rain rates plus rainfall totaled over 1, 3, 6, and 24 hours and longer multi-day periods.

How it's made. Built by combining imagery from a fleet of geostationary satellites (GOES, Meteosat, and Himawari); NOAA is replacing the older Hydro-Estimator with a newer Enterprise Rain Rate algorithm.

How & where you'd use it. Helps track rainfall where ground gauges are sparse, supporting flood watching, water management, and agriculture.

What's measured

aws-pdsagriculturemeteorologicalwaterweather

Coverage & cadence

  • Time span— → ongoing

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

NOTE - The legacy on-premises version of the Global Hydroestimator (GHE) is being retired. It is being replaced by the global Enterprise Rain Rate algorithm. You can find Enterprise Rain Rate products in the new bucket listed under the Resources section. Global Hydro-Estimator provides a global mosaic imagery of rainfall estimates from multi-geostationary satellites, which currently includes GOES-16, GOES-15, Meteosat-8, Meteosat-11 and Himawari-8. The GHE products include: Instantaneous rain rate, 1 hour, 3 hour, 6 hour, 24 hour and also multi-day rainfall accumulation.

Get the data

noaa_access.py
# NOAA Open Data on AWS — public S3, no login
import s3fs

fs = s3fs.S3FileSystem(anon=True)
# find this dataset's bucket in the docs link in the sidebar, then:
# files = fs.ls("noaa-<bucket>/...")
# open NetCDF/GRIB with xarray, COGs with rioxarray
NOAA Open Data is on public AWS S3 — no login at all (anonymous access).