Evaluation of TRMM Product for Monitoring Drought in the Kelantan River Basin, Malaysia

Abstract

Assessment of satellite precipitation products' capability for monitoring drought is relatively new in tropical regions. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the reliability of the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) Multisatellite Precipitation Analysis (TMPA) 3B43 product in estimating the standardized precipitation index (SPI) in the Kelantan River Basin, Malaysia from 1998 to 2014, by comparing it with data from 42 rain gauges. Overall, the TMPA-3B43 performed well in the monthly precipitation estimation, but performed moderately in the seasonal scale. Better performance was found in the northeast monsoon (wet season) than in the southwest monsoon (dry season). The product is more reliable in the northern and north-eastern regions (coastal zone) compared to the central, southern and south-eastern regions (mountainous area). For drought assessment, the correlations between the TMPA-3B43 and ground observations are moderate at various time-scales (one to twelve months), with better performance at shorter time-scales. The TMPA-3B43 shows similar temporal drought behavior by capturing most of the drought events at various time-scales, except for the 2008-2009 drought. These findings show that the TMPA-3B43 is not suitable to be used directly for SPI estimation in this basin. More bias correction and algorithm improvement work are needed to improve the accuracy of the TMPA-3B43 in drought monitoring.

Validation of TRMM 3B42V7 Rainfall Product under Complex Topographic and Climatic Conditions over Hexi Region in the Northwest Arid Region of China

“…Similar results were reported in the study of Cai et al [19] and Xue et al [64], where the mountainous areas show better correlation between 3B42V7 and the rain gauge data. However, the finding is inconsistent with the study by Tan et al [14] in the Kelantan River Basin, Malaysia, where lower CC values are found over the mountainous regions in the southwestern part of the basin. The reason for this difference is related to the different geographical location and magnitude of precipitation in different study area.…”

“…As we all know, The TRMM was originally launched to measure the intensity and area coverage of rainfall around the tropical and semi-tropical areas, as the latitude increases, the detection capability gradually decreases. In addition, the TRMM sensors have better detection capability on the heavy precipitation cloud system [14,62], while over 90% of the precipitation in the Hexi region is concentrated in the warm season, and the heavy precipitation events are all concentrated in this period. In contrast, the poor performance of TRMM 3B42V7 during the cold season can be attributed to the poor detection capability of the light precipitation (less than 3 mm/day) [63].…”

“…Satellite remote sensing precipitation products are particularly valuable in providing spatial-temporal continuous rainfall data, especially in areas where in situ measurements are sparse (leading to greater uncertainty in spatial interpolation products) or absent, like the arid region of northwest China [11][12][13][14]. Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) is one of the most important precipitation projects in hydrological research.…”

Assessment of Three Long-Term Gridded Climate Products for Hydro-Climatic Simulations in Tropical River Basins

“…The majority of existing hydrological and climatological studies, including analyses of the impacts of extreme climatic events have been conducted using ground-based gauge data [7,61]. Therefore, evaluation of other types of precipitation products for extreme events would provide important insight for determining their efficacy and accuracy for unusual climatic conditions [62]. Four indices were used in this study to assess the performance of the three GCPs in capturing the pattern of precipitation extremes over the KRB and JRB: (1) the number of precipitation days ≥10 mm·day −1 in a year (R10mm); (2) the number of precipitation days ≥50 mm·day −1 in a year (R50mm); (3) the annual maximum daily precipitation/streamflow amount(Rx1d); and (4) the annual maximum consecutive five-day precipitation/streamflow amount (Rx5d).…”

Validation of Satellite Rainfall Products over a Mountainous Watershed in a Humid Subtropical Climate Region of Brazil

“…Hydrologic studies play a major role in the monitoring of natural hazards such as droughts [2] and floods [3][4][5]. The most important variable for hydrologic applications is the accurate spatial rainfall data [6], which is a critical input for hydrologic models [3,4,7].…”