Evaluation of Multi-Precipitation Products for Multi-Time Scales and Spatial Distribution During 2007-2015

Recently, several precipitation products are released with the improved algorithm to strengthen the performance of precipitation construction and monitoring. These data play a key role in a wide range of hydrological models, water resources modeling and environmental researches. Especially in developing countries like Vietnam, it is challenging to gather data for long-term time series at scales of daily and sub-daily due to the very coarse density of observation station. In order to overcome the problem of data scarcity, this study aims to evaluate the performance of newest multiple precipitation products including Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM 3B42 V7), Climate Prediction Center (CPC) MORPHing Version 1.0 (CMORPH_V1.0), European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) reanalysis systems (ERA-Interim), Climate Research Unit Time series Version 4.0.1 (CRU TS 4.0.1) and Asian Precipitation-Highly-Resolved Observational Data Integration Towards Evaluation of Water Resources version 2 (APHRODITE) in comparison with measured precipitation for multiple time scales (daily, monthly, seasonal and annual), taking the VuGia-ThuBon (VG-TB) as a pilot basin where climate regime is complex. Seven continuous and four dichotomous statistics are applied to evaluate the precipitation estimates qualitatively at multiple time scales. In addition, specifically, evaluation of spatial distribution of multiple time scales is implemented. The results show lower precipitation estimates in areas of high elevation and higher precipitation estimates over the areas of plain and coastal in comparison with measured precipitation for all considered precipitation data. More importantly, ERA-Interim well captures rain events of heavy rain (50.0-100 mm/day). CMORHPH_V1.0 better reproduces the rain events with little overestimation of light rain (0.6-6 mm/day) than the others. For zero rain events (0-0.6 mm/day), TRMM 3B42 V7 gives the best performance. Furthermore, the cumulative distribution function of APHRODITE well matches the distribution of measured precipitation. All precipitation products completely fail to capture the rain events of extremely heavy rain. More importantly, a formula is proposed to scale and adjust the merged satellite precipitation at a sub-daily scale.

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