Effects of temporal scales and space mismatches on the TRMM 3B42 v7 precipitation product in a remote mountainous area |
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| Authors: | Shiva Ebrahimi Cheng Chen Qiuwen Chen Yinsheng Zhang Ning Ma Qammerul Zaman |
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| Affiliation: | 1. Key Laboratory of Tibetan Environment Changes and Land Surface Processes, Institute of Tibetan Plateau Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China;2. University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China;3. Center for Eco‐Environmental Research, Nanjing Hydraulic Research Institute, Nanjing, China |
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| Abstract: | The accurate measurement of precipitation is essential to understanding regional hydrological processes and hydrological cycling. Quantification of precipitation over remote regions such as the Tibetan Plateau is highly unreliable because of the scarcity of rain gauges. The objective of this study is to evaluate the performance of the satellite precipitation product of tropical rainfall measuring mission (TRMM) 3B42 v7 at daily, weekly, monthly, and seasonal scales. Comparison between TRMM grid precipitation and point‐based rain gauge precipitation was conducted using nearest neighbour and bilinear weighted interpolation methods. The results showed that the TRMM product could not capture daily precipitation well due to some rainfall events being missed at short time scales but provided reasonably good precipitation data at weekly, monthly, and seasonal scales. TRMM tended to underestimate the precipitation of small rainfall events (less than 1 mm/day), while it overestimated the precipitation of large rainfall events (greater than 20 mm/day). Consequently, TRMM showed better performance in the summer monsoon season than in the winter season. Through comparison, it was also found that the bilinear weighted interpolation method performs better than the nearest neighbour method in TRMM precipitation extraction. |
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| Keywords: | satellite precipitation temporal resolution Tibetan Plateau uncertainty |
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