What’s the difference between the real time and research products of the TRMM Multi-satellite Precipitation Analysis (TMPA)?
Version 6 research products are the “real” TRMM products. They are produced a month at a time, available about 2-3 weeks after the end of the month. The upgrade to Version 6 happened in Spring/Summer 2005. The next version (Version 7) is due out in late 2009, at which time the entire record will be reprocessed from January 1998 through the then-current time. Institutionally, TRMM has been joined by a successor project, Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM), which has a nominal launch date of 2013. In the GPM era, some combination-product successor to the TMPA is a high priority. So there is a strong likelihood for a long run of a consistent (via episodic reprocessing) product. The real-time (RT) products, representing an experimental testbed, are posted for the public due to the high demand for such information. Except for processing failures, the RT products are not reprocessed. The last major upgrade occurred in February 2005, so the processing scheme since then has been relatively
