Handbook of Water Harvesting and Conservation

11Global Satellite-Based Precipitation Products

Zhong Liu^1,2, Dana Ostrenga^1,3, Andrey Savtchenko^1,3, William Teng^1,3, Bruce Vollmer¹, Jennifer Wei¹, and David Meyer¹

¹Goddard Earth Sciences Data and Information Services Center, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD, USA

²Center for Spatial Information Science and Systems, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA, USA

³Adnet Systems Inc., Bethesda, MD, USA

11.1 Introduction

Water is essential for life on Earth. Rainwater harvesting is a process of collecting water from rainfall for different purposes (e.g. home gardening, agriculture irrigation). Scales of rainwater harvesting can vary a lot, ranging from backyard or rooftop to reservoir. Accurate and timely available precipitation data and information are critical for research, planning, and applications of rainwater harvesting and conservation around the world. However, precipitation is notoriously difficult to measure and predict. As a result, precipitation data are not uniformly available in space and time and even when they are available, other issues can exist. For example, data access can be a daunting task to many, making research and applications on rainwater harvesting and conservation even more difficult.

Precipitation data obtained from ground-based gauge measurements have existed for many years. Even today, they still play an important role in research and applications, as well as providing valuable information for ground validation and bias correction on ...