NASA trmm data files are a high spatial and temporal resolution rainfall data product. Although I think they may be available as HDF/NetCDF formats from another source, the original source seems to be here:

ftp://trmmopen.gsfc.nasa.gov/pub/merged/

That FTP site also includes some C and Fortran code that needs a bit of a massage to make work. There's issues with endianness and compiler limitations and stack overflows.

So here's an R package. Here's how it works.

• install the package

• Read the header info from wherever you saved the file:

  H = get_header("../Data/3B41RT.2014033100.7.bin")

• Get a layer from the file as a raster object, and plot:

  prec = get_layer(H,"precipitation") plot(prec)

• The metadata is available from H, for example:

  H$variable_name [1] "precipitation" "precipitation_error" "total_pixels"

• You can read all layers into a raster brick:

  data = get_brick(H) plot(data)