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A method has been developed to produce real-time rain gauge–satellite merged analyses of global monthly precipitation. A dataset of these analyses spans the period from January 1979 to the present, which is sufficiently long to allow the computation of reasonably stable base period means from which departures from “normal” can be computed. The dataset is used routinely for global precipitation monitoring purposes at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration/National Weather Service/National Centers for Environmental Prediction/Climate Prediction Center, is updated monthly, and is available via the Internet.
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Janowiak et al. (1999) studied this question.
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