Abstract
Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) Integrated Multi-satellitE Retrievals for GPM (IMERG) high-resolution product and Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) 3B43 product are validated against rain gauges over the island of Cyprus for the period from April 2014 to June 2018. The comparison performed is twofold: firstly, the Satellite Precipitation (SP) estimates are compared with the gauge stations’ records on a monthly basis and, secondly, on an annual basis. The validation is based on ground data from a dense and well-maintained network of rain gauges, available in high temporal (hourly) resolution. The results show high correlation coefficient values, on average reaching 0.92 and 0.91 for monthly 3B43 and IMERG estimates, respectively, although both IMERG and TRMM tend to underestimate precipitation (Bias values of −1.6 and −3.0, respectively), especially during the rainy season. On an annual basis, both SP estimates are underestimating precipitation, although IMERG estimates records (R = 0.82) are slightly closer to that of the corresponding gauge station records than those of 3B43 (R = 0.81). Finally, the influence of elevation of both SP estimates was considered by grouping rain gauge stations in three categories, with respect to their elevation. Results indicated that both SP estimates underestimate precipitation with increasing elevation and overestimate it at lower elevations.
Highlights
Satellite observations have been widely used during recent decades for several meteorological, hydrological and climatological applications incorporating precipitation data worldwide [1,2,3,4,5,6]
The objective of this study is to evaluate statistically the performance and improvement of the Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) Integrated Multi-satellitE Retrievals for GPM (IMERG) product compared to Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) 3B43V7 estimates, exploring, the continuity and uniformity between IMERG and TRMM-era data sets over Cyprus so that they can be used in climate studies as a combined and consistent dataset
An evaluation of the monthly and annual IMERG and TRMM 3B43 product estimates with corresponding rain-gauges data over Cyprus for the period April 2014 to June 2018 was performed
Summary
Satellite observations have been widely used during recent decades for several meteorological, hydrological and climatological applications incorporating precipitation data worldwide [1,2,3,4,5,6]. The Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) platform placed in orbit during the 1997–2015 period, provided reliable data of high spatial (≈25 km) and temporal resolution (3 h), at a geographical coverage between 50◦ N and 50◦ S [12,13,14,15,16,17]. TRMM’s successor, namely, the Global Precipitation Mission (GPM) has been in orbit since 2014, giving estimates at even higher resolutions (≈10 km; 30 min) and geographical coverage from 60◦ S to 60◦ N, making it available for a variety of applications, including the assimilation of GPM data in numerical weather prediction models to improve model forecasting skill [15,16], the monitoring of severe weather events [13,15,16,17], hydrological hazards [18,19], etc
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