The evaluation of TRMM Multisatellite Precipitation Analysis (TMPA) in drought monitoring in the Lancang River Basin

Abstract

Drought is one of the most destructive disasters in the Lancang River Basin, which is an ungauged basin with strong heterogeneity on terrain and climate. Our validation suggested the version-6 monthly TRMM multi-satellite precipitation analysis (TMPA; 3B43 V.6) product during the period 1998 to 2009 is an alternative precipitation data source with good accuracy. By using the standard precipitation index (SPI), at the grid point (0.25°×0.25°) and sub-basin spatial scales, this work assessed the effectiveness of TMPA in drought monitoring during the period 1998 to 2009 at the 1-month scale and 3-months scale; validated the monitoring accuracy of TMPA for two severe droughts happened in 2006 and 2009, respectively. Some conclusions are drawn as follows. (1) At the grid point spatial scale, in comparison with the monitoring results between rain gauges (SPI1 g ) and TMPA grid (SPI1 s ), both agreed well at the 1-month scale for most of the grid points and those grid points with the lowest critical success index (CSI) are distributed in the middle stream of the Lancang River Basin. (2) The same as SPI1 s , the consistency between SPI3 s and SPI3 g is good for most of the grid points at the 3-months scale, those grid points with the lowest were concentrated in the middle stream and downstream of the Lancang River Basin. (3) At the 1-month scale and 3-months scale, CSI ranged from 50% to 76% for most of the grid points, which demonstrated high accuracy of TMPA in drought monitoring. (4) At the 3-months scale, based on TMPA basin-wide precipitation estimates, though we tended to overestimate (underestimate) the peaks of dry or wet events, SPI3 s detected successfully the occurrence of them over the five sub-basins at the most time and captured the occurrence and development of the two severe droughts happened in 2006 and 2009. This analysis shows that TMPA has the potential for drought monitoring in data-sparse regions.

The Temporal-Spatial Characteristics of Drought in the Loess Plateau Using the Remote-Sensed TRMM Precipitation Data from 1998 to 2014

“…In order to evaluate the precipitation data (3B43) with 22 meteorological stations in Singapore from 1998 to 2014 and showed that the TRMM precipitation products performed well in accuracy [21]. Several other studies suggested that it is feasible to use TRMM precipitation data to monitor drought conditions in typical areas of China and Africa [22,23].…”

A topographical model for precipitation pattern in the Tibetan Plateau

“…In recent years, satellite data become available for estimating precipitation over large areas with spatial and temporal consistency (Gao and Liu 2013). It has been demonstrated that satellite derived data have great potential in accurate mapping of precipitation pattern in the Tibetan Plateau (Anders et al 2006;Hao et al 2011;Jia et al 2011;Ji and Chen 2012;Zeng and Li 2012;Qi et al 2013). We consider that the high-resolution precipitation pattern so worked out should be well elucidated.…”

Hydrological monitoring and seasonal forecasting: Progress and perspectives

“…Through combining multi-sensor microwave and infrared data with different algorithms, a few satellite-based global precipitation products, like TRMM Multi-satellite Precipitation Analysis (TMPA) (Huffman et al, 2007) and the latest Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) mission (Hou et al, 2014), have been generated and investigated with great potentials for flood/drought monitoring (Hong et al, 2007;Zeng et al, 2012;Zhao et al, 2015). The satellite-based evapotranspiration (ET) can be successfully estimated in real-time as given the real-time inputs from Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) and surface radiation products derived from geostationary satellites (Tang et al, 2009c).…”