A global assessment of the timing of extreme rainfall from TRMM and GPM for improving hydrologic design

Abstract

The tropical rainfall measuring mission (TRMM) has revolutionized the measurement of precipitation worldwide. However, TRMM significantly underestimates rainfall in deep convection systems, being therefore of little help for the analysis of extreme precipitation depths. This work evaluates the ability of both TRMM and the recently launched global precipitation measurement (GPM) mission to help in the identification of the timing of severe rainfall events. We compare the date of occurrence of the most severe daily rainfall recorded each year by a global rain gauge network with the ones estimated by TRMM. The match rate between the two is found to approach 50%, indicating significant consistency between the two data sources. This figure rises to 60% for GPM, indicating the potential for this new mission to improve the accuracy associated with TRMM. Further efforts are needed in improving the GPM conversion algorithms in order to reduce the bias affecting the estimation of intense depths. The results however show that the timing estimated from GPM can provide a solid basis for an extensive characterization of the spatio-temporal distribution of extreme rainfall in poorly gauged regions of the world.

The Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) mission's scientific achievements and societal contributions: reviewing four years of advanced rain and snow observations

“…Kirstetter et al, 2015;Wen et al, 2016) and internationally (e.g. Libertino et al, 2016). Petkovic and Kummerow (2015) examined the sources of bias in the GMI product, while Tan et al (2016b) compared error sources in IMERG attributable to individual instruments, finding (as expected) that the most reliable IMERG estimates originate from passive microwave estimates.…”

“…Kirstetter et al ., ; Wen et al ., ) and internationally (e.g. Libertino et al ., ). Petkovic and Kummerow () examined the sources of bias in the GMI product, while Tan et al .…”

Performances of GPM satellite precipitation over the two major Mediterranean islands

“…The GPM Core Observatory was launched on February 28, 2014 by a joint effort of NASA and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA). Since then, several studies have examined whether the rainfall products from the GPM mission are capable to accurately estimate global precipitation [8,9,10,11,12] and provide the order of magnitude of discrepancies between observations and satellite products highlighting the reasons for such problems [13,14,15].…”

A quasi‐global assessment of changes in remotely sensed rainfall extremes with temperature

“…The ability of 3B42 to measure rainfall at resolutions and in areas that previously could not be measured [Nicholson et al, 2003;Bookhagen and Burbank, 2006] has allowed the creation of unprecedented data sets for forcing global land models [Sheffield et al, 2006] and the calculation of design rainfall relationships in data-sparse regions [Awadallah and Awadallah, 2013]. The use of 3B42 has been thoroughly tested in hydrology with rainfall amounts [Huffman et al, 2007], rainfall event timing [Libertino et al, 2016], and suitability for hydrological modeling [Collischonn et al, 2008;Su et al, 2008;Li et al, 2013;Zulkafli et al, 2014] all evaluated. TRMM 3B42 correlates well with gauge products, although appearing to underestimate extreme rainfall [Romilly and Gebremichael, 2011;Ward et al, 2011;Prasetia et al, 2013;Lo Conti et al, 2014] particularly when deep convection is present [Rasmussen et al, 2013].…”