The Effect of Spatiotemporal Resolution Degradation on the Accuracy of IMERG Products over the Huai River Basin

Abstract

AbstractThe rapid development of the Integrated Multisatellite Retrievals for Global Precipitation Measurement (IMERG) precipitation product provides new opportunities for a wide range of Earth system and natural hazard applications. Spatiotemporal averaging is a common method for IMERG users to acquire suitable resolutions specific to their research or application purpose and has a direct impact on the overall quality of IMERG precipitation estimates. Here, three different IMERG, version 06 (V06), latency run products (i.e., early, late, and final) are assessed against a ground-based benchmark along a continuous series of spatiotemporal resolutions over the Huai River basin (HuaiRB) between June 2014 and May 2017. In general, IMERG products better capture the spatial pattern of precipitation, and demonstrate better reliability, in the southern portion of the HuaiRB relative to its northern region. Furthermore, the degradation of spatiotemporal resolution is associated with better rain/no-rain determination and the consistent improvement of rainfall product performance metrics. This improvement is more pronounced for IMERG products at fine spatiotemporal resolution. However, due to the presence of autocorrelated errors, the performance improvement associated with the degradation of spatiotemporal resolution is less than theoretical expectations assuming purely uncorrelated errors. Component analysis indicates that while both temporal and spatial aggregation do not mitigate temporally autocorrelated errors, temporal averaging can remove spatially autocorrelated error. Hence, temporal averaging is found to be more effective than spatial averaging for improving the quality of IMERG products. These results will inform users of the reliability of IMERG products at different spatiotemporal scales and assist in unifying former disparate validation assessments applied at different scales within the literature.