NASA: New Year’s storms dump a foot of rain in Southeast

ALBANY — The storm system that passed through the Southeast, doing extensive damage in Albany and Southwest Georgia, dumped as much as a foot of rain over a five-day period, NASA scientists have determined.

More than a dozen tornadoes were reported in connection with the storm, which has been blamed for four deaths in Alabama, two in Georgia (including one in Albany) and one in Florida. The powerful storm generated the twisters, high straight-line winds and flooding Monday night in the Southeast.

NASA officials said they analyzed satellite data and found that up to 12 inches of rain fell Friday through Tuesday over the Southeast.

The Global Precipitation Measurement mission, or GPM, core satellite measures rainfall from space, NASA officials said. It is also part of a constellation of satellites that provides data for NASA’s IMERG, or Integrated Multi-satellite Retrievals for GPM, program, which creates a merged precipitation product from the GPM constellation of satellites.

GPM is a joint mission between NASA and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency.

The IMERG data are produced using data from satellites in the GPM Constellation and then calibrated with measurements from the GPM Core Observatory as well as rain gauge networks around the world. The calculations were done at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.

For more information about GPM, visit: https://www.nasa.gov/gpm.

For more information about IMERG and other precipitation products, visit: https://pmm.nasa.gov.