What are the caveats in using TRMM Multi-satellite Precipitation Analysis (TMPA) products?
• The key caveat is that all of the TMPA products are research products, not “operational” in the sense of hot spares, contingency plans, and backup machines waiting to take over in the event of a failure. Looking back through the RT news, the prospective user should get the sense that the system could run for months at a time, but if there’s a network failure or a disk crash, it might take days to fix, particularly over weekends or holidays. • The TMPA is a gridded product, which is different from the point rain gauge data more familiar to some users. On the other hand, grid values might be more appropriate for certain applications than are point values from rain gauges. • Although the TMPA analysis scheme is consistent for the time period of a given version, the suite of input data varies. For example, there is less of the (higher-quality) microwave data before 2001 or so; the infrared data are on a coarser grid in 1998-1999; gauge sites report individually, and, therefore, are subje
