Grid Resolution: 0.036 degrees lon., 0.044 degrees lat. (approximately 4 km)
Temporal Resolution: every 15 min.
Domain: 127.074 W to 65.890W; 23.285 N to 49.571 N.
Period of Record: October 4, 2004 to present

REFERENCE: Kuligowski, R. J., 2002: A self-calibrating GOES rainfall algorithm for short-term rainfall estimates. J. Hydrometeor., 3, 112-130.

SCaMPR (Kuligowski 2002) is an effort to combine the higher accuracy of microwave rainfall estimates (relative to IR) with the more frequent availability and higher spatial resolution of IR estimates. This is done by using microwave rainfall estimates from the Special Sensor Microwave/Imager (SSM/I) and Advanced Microwave Sounding Unit (AMSU) to calibrate an algorithm that uses GOES IR data and derived parameters as input. Although calibration is performed at the microwave instrument resolution (by aggregating the GOES data onto the microwave footprints), estimates are made at the full resolution of the GOES Imager IR channels. SCaMPR can theoretically use any spatial field as input, but the present version uses only GOES Imager channels 3 (6.9 µm), 4 (10.7 µm), and 6 (13.3 µm), plus differences between pairs of channels. Texture parameters Gt and S from the GMSRA (Ba and Gruber 2000) are also used. Calibration and subsequent rain rate estimation are performed in two phases: Rain/no rain separation: predictors are calibrated against the microwave rain/no rain fields using discriminant analysis. Rain rate estimation: for pixels observed to be producing rainfall in the microwave, predictors are selected and subsequently calibrated aganst the microwave rain rates using forward screening multiple linear regression.