ICIWaRM-Sponsored Precipitation Tools Highlighted at Training Course for Arab States in Lebanon

A “Regional Training Regional Workshop on Remotely Sensed Observation of Precipitation Using Artificial Intelligence” was held at the American University of Beirut (AUB, Lebanon) on 8-15 October 2019. It was organized by UNESCO’s Regional Bureau for Science for the Arab States in partnership with the Center for Hydrometeorology and Remote Sensing at the University of California, Irvine (CHRS) and the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for West Asia (ESCWA). The instructors included Soroosh Sorooshian, Kuolin Hsu and Phu Nguyen of CHRS, along with Bisher Imam, Regional Hydrologist and Senior Programme Specialist for the Regional Bureau.

Rainfall trends from 1983-present using RainSphere. Source: http://rainsphere.eng.uci.edu/

The overall framework was PERSIANN—a continuously evolving system of algorithms for estimation of global precipitation from satellite observations. The PERSIANN products, such as the real-time product iRain and the historical product RainSphere, are freely available through a suite of open access web-mapping interfaces that allow the users, worldwide to visualize, analyze, subset spatially and temporally all of CHRS global data sets.

ICIWaRM along with UNESCO-IHP contributed to the development of several of the PERSIANN products over the last decade.

More information on the workshop is available at gwadi.org.