Let It Snow: Intercomparison of Various Total and Snow Precipitation Data over the Tibetan Plateau

Abstract

The Global Precipitation Measurement Mission (GPM) improved spaceborne precipitation data. The GPM dual-frequency precipitation radar (DPR) provides information on total precipitation (TP), snowfall precipitation (SF) and snowfall flags (surface snowfall flag (SSF) and phase near surface (PNS)), among other variables. Especially snowfall data were hardly validated. This study compares GPM DPR TP, SF and snowfall flags on the Tibetan Plateau (TiP) against TP and SF from six well-known model-based data sets used as ground truth: ERA 5, ERA 5 land, ERA Interim, MERRA 2, JRA 55 and HAR V2. The reanalysis data were checked for consistency. The results show overall high agreement in the cross-correlation with each other. The reanalysis data were compared to the GPM DPR snowfall flags, TP and SF. The intercomparison performs poorly for the GPM DPR snowfall flags (HSS = 0.06 for TP, HSS = 0.23 for SF), TP (HSS = 0.13) and SF (HSS = 0.31). Some studies proved temporal or spatial mismatches between spaceborne measurements and other data. We tested whether increasing the time lag of the reanalysis data (+/−three hours) or including the GPM DPR neighbor pixels (3 × 3 pixel window) improves the results. The intercomparison with the GPM DPR snowfall flags using the temporal adjustment improved the results significantly (HSS = 0.21 for TP, HSS = 0.41 for SF), whereas the spatial adjustment resulted only in small improvements (HSS = 0.12 for TP, HSS = 0.29 for SF). The intercomparison of the GPM DPR TP and SF was improved by temporal (HSS = 0.3 for TP, HSS = 0.48 for SF) and spatial adjustment (HSS = 0.35 for TP, HSS = 0.59 for SF).