Analysing spatio-temporal patterns in wintertime rainfall across Iran’s deserts using GPM DPR data

Abstract

Although known as the warmest deserts of the world, rainfall and integrated water of Lut and Kavir Deserts is still unknown due to insufficient weather stations. The Dual-Frequency Precipitation Radar (DPR) onboard the Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) mission satellite created an opportunity for use to study the rainfall and vertically integrated liquid water content (LWC) and integrated non-liquid (ice) water content (IWC) using statistical and distance analyses over the two deserts during winter months (December to March) of 2015–2020. The results showed good similarity between the GPM DPR and station data with a Pearson correlation coefficient of 0.81. March has the highest contribution in rain amount, which is about 37% in both deserts. March also has the largest contribution of the rainy days, being about 41.4 and 37.6% in the Lut and Kavir Deserts, respectively. LWC has the highest amount in the Lut Desert, while IWC is the largest in the Kavir Desert. Distance analysis showed that there is a significant increasing trend of rainfall from west to east in the Lut Desert. Elevation does not affect rainfall distribution strongly, but rainfall is highly influenced by the atmospheric-driven large-scale parameters.