Abstract
Using high-quality hourly observations from national-level ground-based stations, the satellite-based rainfall products from both the Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) Integrated MultisatellitE Retrievals for GPM (IMERG) and its predecessor, the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) Multi-satellite Precipitation Analysis (TMPA), are statistically evaluated over the Tibetan Plateau (TP), with an emphasis on the diurnal variation. The results indicate that: (1) the half-hourly IMERG rainfall product can explicitly describe the diurnal variation over the TP, but with discrepancies in the timing of the greatest precipitation intensity and an overestimation of the maximum rainfall intensity over the whole TP. In addition, the performance of IMERG on the hourly timescale, in terms of the correlation coefficient and relative bias, is different for regions with sea level height below or above 3500 m; (2) the IMERG products, having higher correlation and lower root-mean-square error, perform better than the TMPA products on the daily and monthly timescales; and (3) the detection ability of IMERG is superior to that of TMPA, as corroborated by a higher Hanssen and Kuipers score, a higher probability of detection, a lower false alarm ratio, and a lower bias. Compared to TMPA, the IMERG products ameliorate the overestimation across the TP. In conclusion, GPM IMERG is superior to TRMM TMPA over the TP on multiple timescales.
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Acknowledgments
The IMERG Final Run data were provided by the NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center’s Mesoscale Atmospheric Processes Laboratory and PPS, which develop and compute the IMERG as a contribution to GPM, and are archived at the NASA GES DISC (https://pmm.nasa.gov/data-access/downloads/gpm). The TRMM 3B42V7 and 3B43 data were provided by the NASA/Goddard Space Flight and obtained freely online at https://pmm.nasa.gov/data-access/downloads/trmm. We acknowledge the editor and anonymous reviewers for their insightful and constructive comments, which helped improve the original manuscript substantially.
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Supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (91437221 and 41775097), Science and Technology Planning Project of Guangdong Province (2017B020218003), and Natural Science Foundation of Guangdong Province (2016A030313140).
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Zhang, S., Wang, D., Qin, Z. et al. Assessment of the GPM and TRMM Precipitation Products Using the Rain Gauge Network over the Tibetan Plateau. J Meteorol Res 32, 324–336 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13351-018-7067-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13351-018-7067-0