Evaluation of eight high spatial resolution gridded precipitation products in Adige Basin (Italy) at multiple temporal and spatial scales

Zheng Duan; Junzhi Liu; Ye Tuo; Gabriele Chiogna; Markus Disse

doi:10.1016/j.scitotenv.2016.08.213

Evaluation of eight high spatial resolution gridded precipitation products in Adige Basin (Italy) at multiple temporal and spatial scales

Sci Total Environ. 2016 Dec 15:573:1536-1553. doi: 10.1016/j.scitotenv.2016.08.213. Epub 2016 Sep 9.

Authors

Zheng Duan¹, Junzhi Liu², Ye Tuo¹, Gabriele Chiogna¹, Markus Disse¹

Affiliations

¹ Chair of Hydrology and River Basin Management, Technical University of Munich, Arcisstrasse 21, 80333 Munich, Germany.
² Key Laboratory of Virtual Geographic Environment (Nanjing Normal University), Ministry of Education, 1 Wenyuan Road, Nanjing, Jiangsu 210023, China; College of Geographic Sciences, Nanjing Normal University, 1 Wenyuan Road, Nanjing, Jiangsu 210023, China; Jiangsu Center for Collaborative Innovation in Geographical Information Resource Development and Application, 1 Wenyuan Road, Nanjing, Jiangsu 210023, China. Electronic address: liujunzhi@njnu.edu.cn.

PMID: 27616713
DOI: 10.1016/j.scitotenv.2016.08.213

Abstract

This study provides a comprehensive evaluation of eight high spatial resolution gridded precipitation products in Adige Basin located in Italy within 45-47.1°N. The Adige Basin is characterized by a complex topography, and independent ground data are available from a network of 101 rain gauges during 2000-2010. The eight products include the Version 7 TRMM (Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission) Multi-satellite Precipitation Analysis 3B42 product, three products from CMORPH (the Climate Prediction Center MORPHing technique), i.e., CMORPH_RAW, CMORPH_CRT and CMORPH_BLD, PCDR (Precipitation Estimation from Remotely Sensed Information using Artificial Neural Networks-Climate Data Record), PGF (Global Meteorological Forcing Dataset for land surface modelling developed by Princeton University), CHIRPS (Climate Hazards Group InfraRed Precipitation with Station data) and GSMaP_MVK (Global Satellite Mapping of Precipitation project Moving Vector with Kalman-filter product). All eight products are evaluated against interpolated rain gauge data at the common 0.25° spatial resolution, and additional evaluations at native finer spatial resolution are conducted for CHIRPS (0.05°) and GSMaP_MVK (0.10°). Evaluation is performed at multiple temporal (daily, monthly and annual) and spatial scales (grid and watershed). Evaluation results show that in terms of overall statistical metrics the CHIRPS, TRMM and CMORPH_BLD comparably rank as the top three best performing products, while the PGF performs worst. All eight products underestimate and overestimate the occurrence frequency of daily precipitation for some intensity ranges. All products tend to show higher error in the winter months (December-February) when precipitation is low. Very slight difference can be observed in the evaluation metrics and aspects between at the aggregated 0.25° spatial resolution and at the native finer resolutions (0.05°) for CHIRPS and (0.10°) for GSMaP_MVK products. This study has implications for precipitation product development and the global view of the performance of various precipitation products, and provides valuable guidance when choosing alternative precipitation data for local community.

Keywords: CHIRPS; CMORPH; GSMaP; PERSIANN; Reanalysis; TRMM.