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The TPW products are generally available from various sensors/satellites. However, these products carry different biases and sampling errors due to the difference in algorithms, instruments, and also temporal and spatial sampling resolutions. What would be helpful, especially to forecasters, is a unified, meteorologically significant TPW field, which merges all available TPW products, with a non-gap global coverage.
The blended TPW products, developed at CIRA with forecasters in mind, merges the TPW retrievals from various satellites/sensors/algorithms, currently including GOES-16, GOES18, NOAA-20, NOAA-21, S-NPP, MetOP-B, MetOP-C, GCOM-W1, GPM, and also Met-GPS, to provide a unified global TPW map to support the NWS user's need.
The blended TPW product, together with its counterpart Percentage of TPW Normal, have being used by forecasters and satellite analysts for years, and approved their value on helping forecasters to analysis and forecast heavy rain and flooding, and also the transfer of moisture from ocean to land. The products are tailored to fit the requests of different end users, such as, AWIPS format over desired AWIPS regions for NWS users and PNG/GIF images for public internet users.
