Abstract
Precipitation in mountain regions is often highly variable and poorly observed, limiting abilities to manage water resource challenges. Here, we evaluate remote sensing and ground station-based gridded precipitation products over Nepal against weather station precipitation observations on a monthly timescale. We find that the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) 3B-43 precipitation product exhibits little mean bias and reasonable skill in giving precipitation over Nepal. Compared to station observations, the TRMM precipitation product showed an overall Nash-Sutcliffe efficiency of 0.49, which is similar to the skill of the gridded station-based product Asian Precipitation-Highly Resolved Observational Data Integration Towards Evaluation of Water Resources (APHRODITE). The other satellite precipitation products considered (Global Satellite Mapping of Precipitation (GSMaP), the Climate Prediction Center Morphing technique (CMORPH), Precipitation Estimation from Remotely Sensed Information Using Artificial Neural Networks-Cloud Classification System (PERSIANN-CCS)) were less skillful, as judged by Nash-Sutcliffe efficiency, and, on average, substantially underestimated precipitation compared to station observations, despite their, in some cases, higher nominal spatial resolution compared to TRMM. None of the products fully captured the dependence of mean precipitation on elevation seen in the station observations. Overall, the TRMM product is promising for use in water resources applications.
Highlights
Mountain regions are critical to regional water resources, with often heavy precipitation supplying river flow to extensive downstream reaches, and are vulnerable to hydrological hazards, such as flooding [1,2]
Remote sensing precipitation products based on satellite observations offer potentially high spatial and temporal resolution and low latency, discrepancies between available products put their accuracy for mountain regions in question [3], necessitating a full evaluation of their skill before they can be recommended for operational use
The archived products are what we evaluate in this paper using time series of station observations, while the availability of a near real time version would enable these products to be operationally used for water resources applications in Nepal
Summary
Mountain regions are critical to regional water resources, with often heavy precipitation supplying river flow to extensive downstream reaches, and are vulnerable to hydrological hazards, such as flooding [1,2]. Since precipitation in mountain regions may vary strongly in space, accurate spatially distributed data are critical to assessing mountain water resources; in many regions, few weather station measurements are available in near real time. Remote sensing precipitation products based on satellite observations offer potentially high spatial and temporal resolution and low latency, discrepancies between available products put their accuracy for mountain regions in question [3], necessitating a full evaluation of their skill before they can be recommended for operational use. Few rain gauge measurements from Nepal are publicly available, especially in near real time, and the national network is inadequate to capture precipitation variability in mountain regions [12,13]
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