Abstract
Rainfall is one of the most basic meteorological and hydrological elements. Quantitative rainfall estimation has always been a common concern in many fields of research and practice, such as meteorology, hydrology, and environment, as well as being one of the most important research hotspots in various fields nowadays. Due to the development of space observation technology and statistics, progress has been made in rainfall quantitative spatial estimation, which has continuously deepened our understanding of the water cycle across different space-time scales. In light of the information sources used in rainfall spatial estimation, this paper summarized the research progress in traditional spatial interpolation, remote sensing retrieval, atmospheric reanalysis rainfall, and multi-source rainfall merging since 2000. However, because of the extremely complex spatiotemporal variability and physical mechanism of rainfall, it is still quite challenging to obtain rainfall spatial distribution with high quality and resolution. Therefore, we present existing problems that require further exploration, including the improvement of interpolation and merging methods, the comprehensive evaluation of remote sensing, and the reanalysis of rainfall data and in-depth application of non-gauge based rainfall data.
Highlights
Precipitation is one of the most basic meteorological and hydrological elements and has intricate tempo-spatial variability
Tian et al [164] pointed out that even if TRMM 3B42RT, or Center morphing technique (CMORPH) is merged with relatively sparse rain gauge data, the error could be reduced by 47% to 63%
A comprehensive review of related literature showed that, thanks to the development of space observation technology and mathematical statistics, quantitative rainfall spatial estimation has greatly improved, which has deepened our understanding of water cycle laws at different space-time scales
Summary
Precipitation is one of the most basic meteorological and hydrological elements and has intricate tempo-spatial variability. Spatial estimation of precipitation has been a vital scientific issue of common concern in many fields, such as meteorology, hydrology, ecology, geology, and so on [4,5,6,7,8,9]. The number of rainfall spatial estimation methods available is relatively high, and new methods are still proposed continuously. These methods are based on special physical and mathematical principles and are adequate for different conditions and tempo-spatial scales.
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