The 2nd International Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) Science Conference will be held on September 6-10, 2004 at the Nara Prefectural New Public Hall. The conference, following the 1st one held in July 2002 in Hawaii, is sponsored by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT) and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).

The TRMM satellite was launched in November 1997 as a joint U.S.-Japan mission to advance understanding of the global energy and water cycle by providing distributions of rainfall and latent heating over the global tropics. For over 6 years, TRMM has contributed significantly towards reducing uncertainty in satellite estimates of rainfall in the Tropics and providing knowledge related to the climatology, seasonality, and variation of tropical rainfall; the mesoscale structure of rain-producing systems; and the physics of precipitation. TRMM has also contributed significant knowledge in areas related to typhoon analysis and forecasting, pollution, lightning, weather forecasting, climate modeling, hydrology, and other areas.

As recent research activities, the US precipitation science team sponsored by NASA has started its activities and the new Japanese TRMM science team has been just founded based on JAXA's 4th Research Announcement. In the conference, scientific results obtained so far on TRMM research will be presented to confirm how close we have attained to the TRMM's goal and in what areas we have exceeded the expectations. In particular, accuracy in estimating rainfall and latent heat products will be focused and discussed, and global precipitation measurement research (including GPM mission) will also be surveyed.

Papers are solicited on all aspects of TRMM research, including climatology, sensor analysis, algorithm development, precipitation system diagnostics, data assimilation and applications.

We are looking forward to receiving many papers!