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Full catalog/TROPICS01PRPSL2B
TROPICS01PRPSL2B·v1.0·dataset

Instant surface rain rate over the tropics (TROPICS-01)

TROPICS01 Pathfinder L2B Instantaneous Surface Rain Rate (ISRR) V1.0
land NASA GES_DISC Level 2
In plain English

What it measures. Estimates how hard it's raining at the surface, moment by moment, across the tropics—an instantaneous rain rate snapshot aimed at watching tropical storms.

How it's made. Derived from a small TROPICS satellite's microwave sounder, which senses temperature, moisture, and precipitation by reading microwave energy at several frequencies, then converted into a rain-rate estimate.

How & where you'd use it. Helps scientists study tropical cyclones—how they form, organize, and intensify—by providing frequent, near-all-weather views of where and how hard it's raining.

What's measured

SPECTRAL/ENGINEERING › MICROWAVE › ANTENNA TEMPERATUREATMOSPHERE › PRECIPITATION › LIQUID PRECIPITATION › RAINATMOSPHERE › WEATHER EVENTS › TROPICAL CYCLONES

Coverage & cadence

  • Time span2021-08-07 → 2023-12-17
  • Measured byTROPICS/01 (TMS)
  • Processing levelLevel 2
  • Spatial extent-180, -90, 180, 90
  • StatusCOMPLETE

What you can do with it

  • Track deforestation, fire scars and land-cover change
  • Monitor crop and vegetation health (NDVI/EVI)
  • Map how built-up vs. green an area is over time
Official description

The "Time-Resolved Observations of Precipitation structure and storm Intensity with a Constellation of Smallsats" (TROPICS) mission has a goal of providing nearly all-weather observations of three-dimensional temperature and humidity, as well as cloud ice and precipitation horizontal structure, at high temporal resolution to conduct high-value science investigations of tropical cyclones. The mission comprises a constellation of six identical Space Vehicles (SVs) conforming to the 3U form factor and hosting a passive microwave spectrometer payload. This dataset is produced from the Pathfinder satellite, a single 3U small satellite, which has launched previous to the constellation, on a sun-synchronous orbital plane. Each SV hosts an identical high-performance spectrometer named the TROPICS Millimeter-wave Sounder (TMS) that will provide temperature profiles using seven channels near the 118.75-GHz oxygen absorption line, water vapor profiles using three channels near the 183-GHz water vapor absorption line, imagery in a single channel near 90 GHz for precipitation measurements (when combined with higher resolution water vapor channels), and a single channel near 205 GHz that is more sensitive to cloud-sized ice particles. This dataset is from the Pathfinder satellite, as the full version of the Level 1a geolocated antenna temperatures (radiance) in units of kelvins that are timestamped to UTC and are reported at native spatial resolutions. Each TROPICS netCDF file contains a granule of data with 81 spots and approximately 2880 scans, where a granule is defined as an orbit's worth of data.

Get the data

tropics01prpsl2b_access.py
import earthaccess
earthaccess.login(strategy="netrc")          # free Earthdata Login

results = earthaccess.search_data(
    short_name="TROPICS01PRPSL2B",
    version="1.0",
    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 GES_DISC
Browsing CMR needs no login. Downloading or streaming bytes needs a free Earthdata Login + the earthaccess package.