Congratulations to HAS Professor and University Distinguished Scholar Ali Behrangi, Recipient of the 2026 AGU Open Science Recognition Prize for the Global Precipitation Climatology Project (GPCP)

Our warmest congratulations go to HAS Professor and University Distinguished Scholar Ali Behrangi and Principal Investigator for the 2026 AGU Open Science Recognition Prize for the Global Precipitation Climatology Project!

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The Global Precipitation Climatology Project (GPCP) team, led by Professor Ali Behrangi since 2017, has been selected to receive the 2026 American Geophysical Union (AGU) Open Science Recognition Prize—one of AGU’s Union-level honors recognizing exceptional contributions that advance open science in Earth and space science. 

The award celebrates GPCP’s nearly four decades of sustained leadership in producing, maintaining, and freely sharing one of the world’s most widely used long-term global precipitation records. By integrating satellite observations, in situ rain-gauge measurements, and rigorous analysis methods into a transparent, continuously updated dataset spanning the early 1980s to the present, GPCP has made essential precipitation information openly accessible to researchers, operational agencies, educators, decision-makers, and international assessment bodies worldwide.

GPCP data have enabled major advances in understanding precipitation variability, droughts, floods, extreme precipitation, cryosphere change, and the global water and energy cycle. The record is used in numerous high-profile scientific publications and assessments, including reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the annual State of the Climate reports published by the American Meteorological Society in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society (BAMS). GPCP products have been used and cited in more than 100,000 publications, underscoring their central role in model evaluation and global precipitation research.

The current GPCP team brings together collaborators from the University of Arizona—Principal Investigator Professor Ali Behrangi, Research Scientist Yang Song, Postdoctoral Researcher Kingsley Kumah, and Ph.D. student Omid Zandi—as well as NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, the University of Maryland, the University of California, Santa Barbara, and Deutscher Wetterdienst (DWD), Germany’s national meteorological service. 

While deeply honored by this recognition, the team is especially excited about the revolutionary next generation of GPCP now under development with NASA support. Building on the project’s long legacy while incorporating new observations, methods, and capabilities, this next-generation product will further strengthen the global precipitation record for science and society. 

The award will be presented to the team at the AGU 2026 Fall Meeting Honors Ceremony in San Francisco. 

The AGU citation recognizes the GPCP team “for long-term stewardship of open global precipitation data enabling trusted climate records for science and society.”

Professor Behrangi will also present an invited talk about the GPCP project in the upcoming AGU 2026 fall meeting in San Francisco. 

Congratulations to one and all for this well deserved recognition!