Journal
WATER RESOURCES RESEARCH
Volume 49, Issue 5, Pages 2461-2472Publisher
AMER GEOPHYSICAL UNION
DOI: 10.1002/wrcr.20246
Keywords
satellite rainfall; validation; hydrology
Categories
Funding
- National Natural Science Foundation of China [51190090]
- 111 Project [B08048]
- Natural Science Foundation of Jiangsu Province [BK2012813]
- Open Research Fund of Key Laboratory of Digital Earth
- Center for Earth Observation and Digital Earth
- Chinese Academy of Sciences [2011LDE008]
- Special Basic Research Fund for Methodology in Hydrology [2011IM011000]
- Qinglan Project of Jiangsu Province
- Open Fund of State Key Laboratory of Hydrology-Water Resources and Hydraulic Engineering [2012490111]
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The TRMM Multi-satellite Precipitation Analysis (TMPA) system underwent a crucial upgrade in early 2009 to include a climatological calibration algorithm (CCA) to its real-time product 3B42RT, and this algorithm will continue to be applied in the future Global Precipitation Measurement era constellation precipitation products. In this study, efforts are focused on the comparison and validation of the Version 6 3B42RT estimates before and after the climatological calibration is applied. The evaluation is accomplished using independent rain gauge networks located within the high-latitude Laohahe basin and the low-latitude Mishui basin, both in China. The analyses indicate the CCA can effectively reduce the systematic errors over the low-latitude Mishui basin but misrepresent the intensity distribution pattern of medium-high rain rates. This behavior could adversely affect TMPA's hydrological applications, especially for extreme events (e.g., floods and landslides). Results also show that the CCA tends to perform slightly worse, in particular, during summer and winter, over the high-latitude Laohahe basin. This is possibly due to the simplified calibration-processing scheme in the CCA that directly applies the climatological calibrators developed within 40 degrees latitude to the latitude belts of 40 degrees N-50 degrees N. Caution should therefore be exercised when using the calibrated 3B42RT for heavy rainfall-related flood forecasting (or landslide warning) over high-latitude regions, as the employment of the smooth-fill scheme in the CCA bias correction could homogenize the varying rainstorm characteristics. Finally, this study highlights that accurate detection and estimation of snow at high latitudes is still a challenging task for the future development of satellite precipitation retrievals.
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