Journal
WATER RESOURCES RESEARCH
Volume 47, Issue -, Pages -Publisher
AMER GEOPHYSICAL UNION
DOI: 10.1029/2011WR010576
Keywords
-
Categories
Funding
- NASA
Ask authors/readers for more resources
Recently, Crow et al. (2009) developed an algorithm for enhancing satellite-based land rainfall products via the assimilation of remotely sensed surface soil moisture retrievals into a water balance model. As a follow-up, this paper describes the benefits of modifying their approach to incorporate more complex data assimilation and land surface modeling methodologies. Specific modifications improving rainfall estimates are assembled into the Soil Moisture Analysis Rainfall Tool (SMART), and the resulting algorithm is applied outside the contiguous United States for the first time, with an emphasis on West African sites instrumented as part of the African Monsoon Multidisciplinary Analysis experiment. Results demonstrate that the SMART algorithm is superior to the Crow et al. baseline approach and is capable of broadly improving coarse-scale rainfall accumulations measurements with low risk of degradation. Comparisons with existing multisensor, satellite-based precipitation data products suggest that the introduction of soil moisture information from the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer via SMART provides as much coarse-scale (3 day, 1 degrees) rainfall accumulation information as thermal infrared satellite observations and more information than monthly rain gauge observations in poorly instrumented regions.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available