Evaluation and comparison of satellite precipitation estimates with reference to a local area in the Mediterranean Sea

Abstract

Precipitation is one of the major variables for many applications and disciplines related to water resources and the geophysical Earth system. Satellite retrieval systems, rain-gauge networks, and radar systems are complementary to each other in terms of their coverage and capability of monitoring precipitation. Satellite-rainfall estimate systems produce data with global coverage that can provide information in areas for which data from other sources are unavailable. Without referring to ground measurements, satellite-based estimates can be biased and, although some gauge-adjusted satellite-precipitation products have been already\ud developed, an effective way of integrating multi-sources of precipitation information is still a challenge. In this study, a specific area, the Sicilia Island (Italy), has been selected for the evaluation of satellite-precipitation products based on rain-gauge data. This island is located in the Mediterranean Sea, with a particular climatology and morphology, which can be considered an interesting test site for satellite-precipitation products in the European mid-latitude area. Four satellite products (CMORPH, PERSIANN, PERSIANN-CCS, and TMPA-RT) and two GPCP-adjusted products (TMPA and PERSIANN Adjusted) have been selected. Evaluation and comparison of selected products is performed with reference to data provided by the rain-gauge network of the Island Sicilia and by using statistical and graphical tools. Particular\ud attention is paid to bias issues shown both by only-satellite and adjusted products. In order to investigate the current and potential possibilities of improving estimates by means of adjustment procedures using GPCC ground precipitation, the data have been retrieved separately and compared directly with the reference rain-gauge network data set of the study area. Results show that bias is still considerable for all satellite products, then some considerations about larger area climatology, PMW-retrieval algorithms, and GPCC data are discussed to address this issue, along with the spatial and seasonal characterization of results

Temporal and spatial evaluation of satellite-based rainfall estimates across the complex topographical and climatic gradients of Chile

“…The aforementioned underestimation of CMORPH was in agreement with previous studies (e.g. Abera et al, 2016;Ringard et al, 2015;Lo Conti et al, 2014;Dinku et al, 2010) as well as the acceptable linear correlation (Abera et al, 2016), in particular at monthly timescales. The fact that CMORPH presented the highest underestimation of rainfall for almost all timescales very likely is because CMORPH does not use any observed precipitation data to compute its estimates, in contrast to all the other analysed SREs.…”

Evaluation of Six High-Resolution Satellite and Ground-Based Precipitation Products over Malaysia

“…Lo Conti et al [51] found, however, that the performance of SPPs tends to increase from one to five days and to remain stable at higher temporal aggregation. Estimations from all SPPs were significantly different from observations, at p < 0.05 (Table 3).…”

Comprehensive Evaluation of Two Successive V3 and V4 IMERG Final Run Precipitation Products over Mainland China

“…Quantitative and systematical precipitation estimations from satellite-based precipitation products have been used in hydrology, climatology, and water-resources management [9][10][11][12][13]. However, it remains a worthy challenge to produce accurate satellite-based precipitation estimations due to the great temporal and spatial variability of the products, acquisitions at different scales, inhomogeneous distributions of rain gauges, complex topography, and cold weather [14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23].…”