Abstract
AbstractThe Integrated Multi‐satellitE Retrievals for Global Precipitation Measurement mission (IMERG) aims to deliver the “best” precipitation estimation from space and has attracted much attention. The Version 05 of IMERG products including the near‐real‐time “Early” and “Late” run products (IMERG‐E and IMERG‐L, respectively), and the post‐real‐time “Final” run IMERG product (IMERG‐F) are assessed at both national and basin scales against gauge observations over Mainland China for a 4‐year period (from April 2014 to March 2018). As control products for comparison, their predecessor Tropical Rainfall Measurement Mission (TRMM) Multi‐satellite Precipitation Analysis (TMPA) products (i.e., TMPA‐RT and TMPA‐V7) are also employed. Components analysis confirms the best performance of IMERG‐F among the five SPEs in three different categories. All five SPEs feature increasing bias and root mean square difference (RMSD) with increasing daily gauge total precipitation, and such issue is less pronounced for IMERG‐F—as evidenced by the lowest bias and RMSD across all precipitation rates. Besides, compared to TMPA, IMERG products exhibit better accuracy in detecting real precipitation evens, especially for light‐to‐medium rain (<60 mm/day), but they do not demonstrate significant improvement in the assessment of severe over/underestimation. In the basin‐scale comparison, all five SPEs catch the key variation feature of basin‐averaged precipitation time series (except TMPA‐RT over Continental River Basin). Overall, IMERG‐F demonstrates the best performance over all nine basins despite the slight overestimation, followed by TMPA‐V7. IMERG‐E and IMERG‐L show performance close to or even better than TMPA‐V7 in terms of the correlation coefficient and RMSD.
Highlights
Floods are among the most common and costly natural hazards worldwide (Hong et al, 2010)
Since the southeastern and eastern parts of Mainland China are located in the East Asian monsoon region, the spatial distribution of precipitation accumulation exhibits the influence of the monsoon over the corresponding regions
Mainland China suffers from the influence of the midlatitude westerlies
Summary
Floods are among the most common and costly natural hazards worldwide (Hong et al, 2010). Flood‐related disasters have caused economic losses of tens of billions of dollars (USD) and a large number of casualties each year (Hirabayashi et al, 2013). Most of these losses and casualties appeared in densely populated and underdeveloped countries (Wu et al, 2012), and the increasing climate variability may exacerbate the flood damages in the future (Hirabayashi et al, 2013). Appropriate past‐ or real‐time precipitation data are often insufficient in most developing countries (e.g., China) and many remote parts of the world, which makes it difficult to build the operational FFS
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