Abstract
A new precipitation dataset is provided since 2014 by the Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) satellite constellation measurements combined in the Integrated Multi-satellite Retrievals for GPM (IMERG) algorithm. This recent GPM-IMERG dataset provides potentially useful precipitation data for regions with a low density of rain gauges. The main objective of this study is to evaluate the accuracy of the near real-time product (IMERG-E) compared to observed rainfall and its suitability for hydrological modeling over a mountainous watershed in Morocco, the Ghdat located upstream the city of Marrakech. Several statistical indices have been computed and a hydrological model has been driven with IMERG-E rainfall to estimate its suitability to simulate floods during the period from 2011 to 2018. The following results were obtained: (1) Compared to the rain gauge data, satellite precipitation data overestimates rainfall amounts with a relative bias of +35.61% (2) In terms of the precipitation detection capability, the IMERG-E performs better at reproducing the different precipitation statistics at the catchment scale, rather than at the pixel scale (3) The flood events can be simulated with the hydrological model using both the observed and the IMERG-E satellite precipitation data with a Nash–Sutcliffe efficiency coefficient of 0.58 and 0.71, respectively. The results of this study indicate that the GPM-IMERG-E precipitation estimates can be used for flood modeling in semi-arid regions such as Morocco and provide a valuable alternative to ground-based precipitation measurements.
Highlights
The Mediterranean regions are often affected by deadly flood events that are considered as the most dangerous hydrometeorological risk [1]
Hydrological simulations of flood events using a hydrological model is performed with either rain gauge data or Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) Integrated Multi-satellite Retrievals for GPM (IMERG)-E precipitation data
The GPM IMERG-E product is evaluated against the rain gauge data using six statistical indices considered (CC, Mean error (ME), Root-mean square error (RMSE), BIAS, probability of detection (POD) and false alarm ratio (FAR)) at both basin scale and the individual grid-cells corresponding to rain gauges during the available period from January 2011 to December 2018
Summary
The Mediterranean regions are often affected by deadly flood events that are considered as the most dangerous hydrometeorological risk [1]. Floods are essentially caused by intense precipitation [2,3]. Which can generate destructive floods that cause several deaths [4,5]. There, in addition to the intense precipitation, steep slopes cause destructive floods [7], such as the catastrophic event of the Ourika valley in the summer of 1995 that caused several hundred deaths [8]. In autumn 2014, intense precipitation and major floods in southwestern Morocco caused 47 deaths [9,10] and in the summer of 2019 in the Anti-Atlas Mountain, a deadly flash flood caused seven deaths.
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