Rainfall analysis for Indian monsoon region using the merged rain gauge observations and satellite estimates: Evaluation of monsoon rainfall features

Abstract

Objective analysis of daily rainfall at the resolution of 1° grid for the Indian monsoon region has been carried out merging dense land rainfall observations and INSAT derived precipitation estimates. This daily analysis, being based on high dense rain gauge observations was found to be very realistic and able to reproduce detailed features of Indian summer monsoon. The inter-comparison with the observations suggests that the new analysis could distinctly capture characteristic features of the summer monsoon such as north-south oriented belt of heavy rainfall along the Western Ghats with sharp gradient of rainfall between the west coast heavy rain region and the rain shadow region to the east, pockets of heavy rainfall along the location of monsoon trough/low, over the east central parts of the country, over north-east India, along the foothills of Himalayas and over the north Bay of Bengal. When this product was used to assess the quality of other available standard climate products (CMAP and ECMWF reanalysis) at the gird resolution of 2.5°, it was found that the orographic heavy rainfall along Western Ghats of India was poorly identified by them. However, the GPCC analysis (gauge only) at the resolution of 1° grid closely discerns the new analysis. This suggests that there is a need for a higher resolution analysis with adequate rain gauge observations to retain important aspects of the summer monsoon over India. The case studies illustrated show that the daily analysis is able to capture large-scale as well as mesoscale features of monsoon precipitation systems. This study with data of two seasons (2001 and 2003) has shown sufficiently promising results for operational application, particularly for the validation of NWP models.