Abstract
The error in satellite precipitation-driven complex terrain flood simulations is characterized in this study for eight different global satellite products and 128 flood events over the Eastern Italian Alps. The flood events are grouped according to two flood types: rain floods and flash floods. The satellite precipitation products and runoff simulations are evaluated based on systematic and random error metrics applied on the matched event pairs and basin-scale event properties (i.e., rainfall and runoff cumulative depth and time series shape). Overall, error characteristics exhibit dependency on the flood type. Generally, timing of the event precipitation mass center and dispersion of the time series derived from satellite precipitation exhibits good agreement with the reference; the cumulative depth is mostly underestimated. The study shows a dampening effect in both systematic and random error components of the satellite-driven hydrograph relative to the satellite-retrieved hyetograph. The systematic error in shape of the time series shows a significant dampening effect. The random error dampening effect is less pronounced for the flash flood events and the rain flood events with a high runoff coefficient. This event-based analysis of the satellite precipitation error propagation in flood modeling sheds light on the application of satellite precipitation in mountain flood hydrology.
Highlights
The potential of high-resolution satellite precipitation estimation in hydrological applications has been investigated for more than two decades [1,2,3,4,5]
This study focuses on the analysis of satellite precipitation error propagation in flood simulations, expanding on two main aspects: (i) evaluating a relatively large number of flood events that occurred over mountainous basins; (ii) examining error propagation for different flood types and with respect to several characteristics of flood response
The CMORPH products, the gauge-adjusted ones, are overestimating the gauge rainfall. This leads to overestimation in the simulated flow. It is worth noting from this figure that, the 3B42V7 product is underestimating the reference rainfall, its distinctly high initial flow condition yields overestimation of the gauge-simulated flood event
Summary
The potential of high-resolution satellite precipitation estimation in hydrological applications has been investigated for more than two decades [1,2,3,4,5]. The main advantage to the conventional ground-based measurements is that precipitation estimation from space-borne sensors is uninhibited by topography, and can provide coherent global-scale estimates at high space (0.25 ̋ ) and time (3 h) resolution [6,7,8]. This provides a potential solution for measuring precipitation over complex terrain basins where ground-based measurement networks are sparsely distributed or unavailable. It has been argued that the performance of satellite precipitation estimates and its driven simulation largely depend on the regional rainfall properties (e.g., types, magnitudes, space-time pattern, etc.), the geomorphology of the area (e.g., surface inclination, basin scales, etc.), the basin conditions (e.g., soil moisture, existence of snow cover, etc.), the choice of modeling complexity and, the interactions between all of these factors [10,11,12,13,14,15].
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