Abstract
Drought is a natural phenomenon that originates from the absence of precipitation over a certain period and is capable of causing damage to societal development. With the advent of orbital remote sensing, rainfall estimates from satellites have appeared as viable alternatives to monitor natural hazards in ungauged basins and complex areas of the world; however, the accuracies of these orbital products still need to be verified. Thus, this work aims to evaluate the performance of Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) satellite rainfall estimates in monitoring the spatiotemporal behavior of droughts at multiple temporal scales over Paraíba State based on the standardized precipitation index (SPI) over 20 years (1998–2017). For this purpose, rainfall data from 78 rain gauges and 187 equally spaced TRMM cell grids throughout the region are used, and accuracy analyses are performed at the single-gauge level and in four mesoregions at eight different time scales based on 11 statistical metrics calculations divided into three different categories. The results show that in the mesoregions close to the coast, the satellite-based product is less accurate in capturing the drought behavior regardless of the evaluated statistical metrics. At the temporal scale, the TRMM is more accurate in identifying the pattern of medium-term droughts; however, there is considerable spatial variation in the accuracy of the product depending on the performance index. Therefore, it is concluded that rainfall estimates from the TRMM satellite are a valuable source of data to identify drought behavior in a large part of Paraíba State at different time scales, and further multidisciplinary studies should be conducted to monitor these phenomena more accurately based on satellite data.
Highlights
Water is the most important resource for life on the planet and for the development of society and the economy
On the other hand, [41] concluded that the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM)-estimated data become more inaccurate with the increase in the time scale in Malaysia and related this result to the size of the TRMM-estimated time series. These results indicate that it is necessary to investigate the accuracy of the standardized precipitation index (SPI) values based on TRMM-estimated data among the regions, as these values can vary, which highlights the importance of this study for Paraíba State
kappa coefficient (Kp) values increased in the center of Paraíba State, such that Sertão Paraibano and Borborema presented the highest values, while in regions close to the coast, the results indicated the low accuracy in capturing the types of drought and wet events
Summary
Water is the most important resource for life on the planet and for the development of society and the economy. Drought is one of the most challenging phenomena in environmental monitoring and has been gaining more prominence due to the occurrence of severer and more frequent extreme phenomena worldwide [3], affecting increasingly more people, especially in arid and semiarid regions [4,5]. The impacts of drought affect different sectors of society, such as electricity generation, agriculture, water resources, tourism and ecosystems [8]. Droughts are responsible for various disorders in the population, which places these extreme events among the most severe natural disasters at both global and regional levels [9], as well as one of the most extensive disasters in the world [2]
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