Tropical depression 1F has formed in the southwestern Pacific Ocean, and a NASA satellite revealed that it already has moderate rainfall as it continues to get organized. The Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission or TRMM satellite passed over Tropical Depression 1F on November 26 at 1202 UTC (7:02 a.m. EST) and captured rainfall rates near 1.0 inches per hour in the southern half of the storm. TRMM’s pathway over the depression only covered the southern half of it, so there was no data available for the rainfall rates in the northern half. TRMM is a joint mission between NASA and the Japanese Space Agency, JAXA.

Fiji is an island nation in Melanesia in the South Pacific Ocean about 1,240 miles (2000 km) northeast of New Zealand’s North Island, located in the southwestern Pacific Ocean. Fiji comprises an archipelago of more than 332 islands. Of those, 110 islands are permanently inhabited. The two major islands of Fiji are called Viti Levu and Vanua Levu.

The Nadi Tropical Cyclone Center is the organization that forecasts tropical cyclones in that region of the world. It was officially designated by World Meteorological Organization in 1995 as a Regional Specialized Meteorological Center (RSMC) with activity specialization in tropical cyclones tasked to provide “first-level” information in tropical cyclones in the South-West Pacific Ocean.

A low pressure area in the western Caribbean Sea still has a slight chance of developing into a tropical depression as it closes in for a landfall, but that’s not stopping it from dropping heavy rainfall in Central America today.

The low is forecast to make landfall on the Belize coast today, November 19, and continues to move westward and further inland. Although the National Hurricane Center in Miami, Fla. still gives the system a ten percent chance of developing into a tropical depression, it continues to drop moderate to heavy rainfall over Belize and Guatemala today.

At 1 a.m. EST today, the center of the low was located near Roatan Island, Honduras near 16.9 North and 85.8 West.

By 7 a.m. EST, the weak low pressure area had disorganized showers and thunderstorms. It was centered over the Gulf of Honduras and was moving westward between 5 and 10 mph. It is expected to move inland later today over Belize and Guatemala.

The Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite called GOES-13 captured a visible image of the low’s clouds on Nov. 19 at 1431 UTC (9:31 a.m. EDT). The image showed most of the clouds associated with the low were located to the north and west of its center and already over Guatemala and Belize.