Abstract
Abstract. As the largest river basin of the Tibetan Plateau, the upper Brahmaputra River basin (also called “Yarlung Zangbo” in Chinese) has profound impacts on the water security of local and downstream inhabitants. Precipitation in the basin is mainly controlled by the Indian summer monsoon and westerly and is the key to understanding the water resources available in the basin; however, due to sparse observational data constrained by a harsh environment and complex topography, there remains a lack of reliable information on basin-wide precipitation (there are only nine national meteorological stations with continuous observations). To improve the accuracy of basin-wide precipitation data, we integrate various gauge, satellite, and reanalysis precipitation datasets, including GLDAS, ITP-Forcing, MERRA2, TRMM, and CMA datasets, to develop a new precipitation product for the 1981–2016 period over the upper Brahmaputra River basin, at 3 h and 5 km resolution. The new product has been rigorously validated at different temporal scales (e.g., extreme events, daily to monthly variability, and long-term trends) and spatial scales (point and basin scale) with gauge precipitation observations, showing much improved accuracies compared to previous products. An improved hydrological simulation has been achieved (low relative bias: −5.94 %; highest Nash–Sutcliffe coefficient of efficiency (NSE): 0.643) with the new precipitation inputs, showing reliability and potential for multidisciplinary studies. This new precipitation product is openly accessible at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3711155 (Wang et al., 2020) and additionally at the National Tibetan Plateau Data Center (https://data.tpdc.ac.cn, last access: 10 July 2020, login required).
Highlights
Precipitation plays a very important role in the research of hydrology, meteorology, ecology, and even social economics as it is a critical input factor for various models
The Tibetan Plateau (TP), known as the highest plateau in the world, is covered by massive glaciers, snow, and permafrost, which significantly affect the hydrological processes of all the large rivers that are fed by it: the Brahmaputra, the Salween, and the Mekong, among others
We focus on integrating gauge, satellite, and reanalysis precipitation datasets to generate a new dataset over the upper Brahmaputra, suitable for use in hydrological simulations and other scientific research related to climate change
Summary
Precipitation plays a very important role in the research of hydrology, meteorology, ecology, and even social economics as it is a critical input factor for various models (e.g., hydrological and land surface models; Qi et al, 2016; L. Wang et al, 2017; Fang et al, 2019; Miri et al, 2019; S. Wang et al, 2019). Li et al, 2019); to the best of our knowledge, there has been less focus on the evaluation of methods of precipitation estimation and little work on the corresponding river discharge simulations within the upper Brahmaputra River basin These precipitation products generally have the advantage of wide and consistent coverage and have shown great potential in many applications (Li et al, 2015; Zhang et al, 2017; Fang et al, 2019) and suffer from large uncertainties over the upper Brahmaputra River basin due to indirect observations, insufficient gauge calibration, and complex topography (Tong et al, 2014; Yong et al, 2015; Xu et al, 2017). We focus on integrating gauge, satellite, and reanalysis precipitation datasets to generate a new dataset over the upper Brahmaputra, suitable for use in hydrological simulations and other scientific research related to climate change.
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