Abstract
Accurate measurement of precipitation is vital to investigate the spatial and temporal patterns of precipitation at various scales for rainfall-runoff modeling. However, accurate and consistent precipitation measurement is relatively sparse in many developing countries like Ethiopia. Nevertheless, satellite precipitation products may serve as important inputs for modeling in an area with scarce field data for a wide range of hydrological applications. In this study we evaluate the high-resolution satellite rainfall products for hydrological simulation, the Climate Hazards Group Infrared Precipitation with Stations (CHIRPS) and Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission Multisatellite Precipitation Analysis (TMPA_3B42v7) satellite rainfall products for stream flow simulation at daily temporal and 0.25° × 0.25° spatial resolution. The study area is located in Dabus watershed, Abbay basin, Ethiopia. We applied a nonlinear power law to remove the systematic error of satellite precipitation estimates for input into HEC-HMS hydrological model for runoff generation. The performance of the satellite rainfall and hydrological model was evaluated using Nash–Sutcliffe efficiency (ENS), coefficient of determination (R2), relative volume error (RVE), and percentage error of peak flow objective functions. The result of HEC-HMS model performance revealed R2 of 0.78, ENS of 0.69 for CHIRPS_2 and R2 of 0.79, ENS of 0.76 for TMPA_3B42v7 satellite rainfall products during calibration periods. Our result indicated that the HEC-HMS model well predicated catchment runoff for both satellite precipitation products. The study shows that the model performance was significantly improved when bias-corrected satellite rainfall input replaced than the original uncorrected satellite products. Overall, our study showed that gauge-based simulation outperformed than satellite in terms of all objective functions over the study area.
Highlights
Precise measurement of precipitation at global and regional scale are acute for understanding the climate and hydrological cycle, simulating land surface hydrological processes, water resources management (Stage et al 2017)
The precipitation data used in this study were obtained from in situ measurements and two satellite-based rainfall estimation products, CHIRPS_2 and TMPA_3B42v7, for a period of 16 years (2000–2015)
Based on daily mean values, Begie station indicated a wider difference between in situ and CHIRPS_2 precipitation products when compared to other stations which is 1.074 mm/day followed by Abadie station with 0.866 mm/day
Summary
Precise measurement of precipitation at global and regional scale are acute for understanding the climate and hydrological cycle, simulating land surface hydrological processes, water resources management (Stage et al 2017). Variations in precipitation often influenced by nonlinear relations between numerous factors like local differences of topography, the orientation of mountains and aspects (Haile et al 2009) which clues directly to flexible discharge output (Biemans 2012) and fluctuations in water storage (Narjary and Kamra 2013). This leads to incorrect simulation results and sometimes even in wrong conclusions (Vrgut et al 2005).
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