Correcting temporal sampling error in radar-rainfall: Effect of advection parameters and rain storm characteristics on the correction accuracy

Abstract

Summary This study offers a method to correct for the radar temporal sampling error when determining radar-rainfall accumulations. The authors evaluate the correction effect with respect to multiple factors associated with storm advection, rainfall characteristics, and different rainfall accumulation time scales. The advection method presented in this study uses linear interpolation of static rain storm locations observed at two intermittent radar sampling times to correct for the missed rainfall accumulations. The advection correction is applied to the high space (0.5 km) and time (5-min) resolution radar-rainfall products provided by the Iowa Flood Center. We use the ground reference data from a high quality and high density rain gauge network distributed over the Turkey River basin in Iowa to evaluate the advection corrected rain fields. We base our evaluation on six rain events and examine the correction performance/improvement with respect to the advection discretization, spatial grid aggregation, rainfall basin coverage, and conditional average rainfall intensity. The results show that the 1-min advection discretization is sufficient to represent the observed distribution of storm velocities for the presented cases. Grid aggregation that is motivated by the need to expedite the computation may induce errors in estimating advection vectors. The authors found that while the advection correction tends to enhance the QPE accuracy for intense rain storms over small or isolated areas, it has little impact on the improvement of light rain estimation.