Engaging with and Expanding GPM End User Communities

The use of high-quality precipitation data from NASAs Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) mission has enabled decision making that directly impact people around the world, from short-term crises to long-term plans. Such decisions include water resource management, crop forecasting, ecological monitoring, disaster response, public health, aviation, weather forecasting, and climate modeling, among others. GPM applications efforts have continued to focus on engaging user communities through workshops, webinars, outreach activities, and in person trainings and interviews. The goals of these efforts are to understand the needs of the user community, determine what GPM products are of highest value and use, and advance the use of these data to support decision making and improve situational awareness across different sectors at local to global scales. These efforts have helped the GPM mission establish a large stakeholder community that encompasses federal and state partners, academic institutions, and private and non-profit companies, with end users exceeding over 9,000 in 2020 alone. Of this community, GPMs Level 3 gridded products are used nearly 16 times more for research and applications compared to other GPM Levels one and two products. As such, the GPM multi-satellite global gridded product plays a key role for enabling applications. As we move forward, engagement activities from the GPM Applications Team is essential to support, connect and enable how future observing systems and their data products can be used to benefit society through a broad range of applications and user communities. In this presentation we present an overview of current applications activities, summarize current patterns of data use within stakeholder communities, outline some case studies, and provide some lessons learned to capture effective engagement strategies. We also look towards future community engagement in preparation for the NASA Earth System Observatory mission activities.