Hydrologic evaluation of Multisatellite Precipitation Analysis standard precipitation products in basins beyond its inclined latitude band: A case study in Laohahe basin, China

Abstract

[1] Two standard Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) Multisatellite Precipitation Analysis (TMPA) products, 3B42RT and 3B42V6, were quantitatively evaluated in the Laohahe basin, China, located within the TMPA product latitude band (50°NS) but beyond the inclined TRMM satellite latitude band (36°NS). In general, direct comparison of TMPA rainfall estimates to collocated rain gauges from 2000 to 2005 show that the spatial and temporal rainfall characteristics over the region are well captured by the 3B42V6 estimates. Except for a few months with underestimation, the 3B42RT estimates show unrealistic overestimation nearly year round, which needs to be resolved in future upgrades to the real-time estimation algorithm. Both model-parameter error analysis and hydrologic application suggest that the three-layer Variable Infiltration Capacity (VIC-3L) model cannot tolerate the nonphysical overestimation behavior of 3B42RT through the hydrologic integration processes, and as such the 3B42RT data have almost no hydrologic utility, even at the monthly scale. In contrast, the 3B42V6 data can produce much better hydrologic predictions with reduced error propagation from input to streamflow at both the daily and monthly scales. This study also found the error structures of both RT and V6 have a significant geo-topography-dependent distribution pattern, closely associated with latitude and elevation bands, suggesting current limitations with TRMM-era algorithms at high latitudes and high elevations in general. Looking into the future Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) era, the Geostationary Infrared (GEO-IR) estimates still have a long-term role in filling the inevitable gaps in microwave coverage, as well as in enabling sub-hourly estimates at typical 4-km grid scales. Thus, this study affirms the call for a real-time systematic bias removal in future upgrades to the IR-based RT algorithm using a simple scaling factor. This correction is based on MW-based monthly rainfall climatologies applied to the combined monthly satellite-gauge research products.

Evaluation of global fine-resolution precipitation products and their uncertainty quantification in ensemble discharge simulations

“…These results reveal that a hydrological model can amplify uncertainties in input data but also reduce uncertainties, which may be due to the nonlinear runoff generation process in hydrological models. This finding is consistent with the research by Yong et al (2010).…”

“…Several studies have been carried out to analyse the uncertainty of TRMM in high-latitude regions (Yong et al, 2010(Yong et al, , 2014Chen et al, 2013a;Zhao and Yatagai, 2014), but studies in northeast China are few. Evaluation of GLDAS data has generally been limited to the United States and other observationrich regions of the world (Kato et al, 2007); assessments and applications in other regions are rare (Wang et al, 2011;Zhou et al, 2013).…”

Multiscale Comparative Evaluation of the GPM IMERG v5 and TRMM 3B42 v7 Precipitation Products from 2015 to 2017 over a Climate Transition Area of China

“…However, there is a typical scale mismatch issue between point-based rain gauge data and the gridded precipitation products [22]. Many interpolation methods (inverse distance weighting, kriging, spline, and Thiessen polygon for example) [22,33,53] and grid-to-point techniques (such as nearest neighbor, bilinear weighted interpolation) [41] have been proposed to compare the point-based rain gauge data and pixel-based satellite precipitation data. Each method has its advantages and disadvantages, and its performance depends on various factors and varies from region to region [22].…”

“…The r was used to quantify the type of correlation and dependence between satellite products and gauge observations in fundamental statistics. The RB and RRMSE were used to describe the bias and error of satellite precipitation compared with gauge observations [33][34][35]. The equations of the indicators are as follows:…”

Error-Component Analysis of TRMM-Based Multi-Satellite Precipitation Estimates over Mainland China

“…The current operational Version-7 TMPA system produces two standard user-level (Level 3) rainfall products at relatively fine resolution (0.25˝ˆ0.25˝, 3 h), i.e., the real-time 3B42RT (hereafter referred to as "RTV7"; 6-9 h after observation time) for the latitude band 60˝N-60˝S and the gauge-adjusted, post-real-time 3B42V7 for research purposes (hereafter "V7"; two months latency) with spatial coverage of 50˝N-50˝S [5,6]. Recently, these two quasi-global satellite precipitation products have been widely utilized in various hydrological and meteorological applications in China [7][8][9][10][11][12][13]. Over the years, there have been many efforts to compare and validate available satellite precipitation estimates at global, regional, or basin scales [9,10,[14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25].…”