Reliable global quantitative precipitation measurement is critically important for a variety of applications, including flood forecasting, numerical weather prediction, understanding the evolution of hurricanes and severe storms, and tracking of long-term trends in global precipitation and water supply. When combined with comprehensive ground validation and calibration, satellite observations offer practical prospects for acquiring accurate and global datasets especially over oceans and remote regions. Since the advent of satellite sensing of clouds and precipitation there has been much progress in terms of instrumentation and algorithm development. The Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM), launched in 1997, represents an advanced active and passive remote sensing system to measure precipitation. Each precipitation satellite mission requires thorough ground validation to test instrument and algorithm performance. With the success of the TRMM and the plans for TRMM's successor mission, the Global Precipitation Measurement mission (GPM), the current era represents •
GRSS Liaison to IEEE Women in Engineerings the IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Society (GRSS) embarks on publishing the new GRS Magazine in 2013, the Society has also inaugurated an initiative to focus on women in the geoscience and remote sensing fields. In future issues this regular magazine column will explore such topics as promoting networking among women, recruiting a diverse workforce, work-life balance, diversity, professional development and gender/diversity statistics for IEEE as a whole, our Society, our publications and our annual symposium, IGARSS. We will also occasionally publish feature articles on female leaders, trailblazers, and up-andcoming scientists and engineers within our society. We hope and expect the topics of this column to be of interest to both women and men.In this issue we report on our initial activities during 2012. These consist mainly of a new LinkedIn group, the first-ever Women in Geoscience and Remote Sensing Luncheon at IGARSS and GRSS participation with a Society liaison to the IEEE Women in Engineering (WIE) Committee. Having a liaison to WIE allows our Society to interact with the larger community of WIE to obtain the pulse of IEEE on women's issues and activities. Our Women in Geoscience and Remote Sensing LinkedIn Group was launched in April 2012 and now has over 220 members and more than 35 distinct discussion topics. Members are from all over the world, including women and men from students to senior researchers, and both GRSS members and non-members. If you are interested in joining, go to www.linkedin.com/ groups?gid=4422435, log into LinkedIn and request to join our group.
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