Evaluation of the PERSIANN-CDR daily rainfall estimates in capturing the behavior of extreme precipitation events over China

Abstract:

This study evaluates the performance of a newly developed daily precipitation climate data record, called PERSIANN-CDR, in capturing the behavior of daily extreme precipitation events in China during the period of 1983-2006. Different extreme precipitation indices, in three categories of percentile, absolute threshold, and maximum indices, are studied and compared with the same indices from the East Asia (EA) ground-based gridded daily precipitation dataset. The results show that PERSIANN-CDR depicts similar results, as the ground-based EA product in terms of capturing the spatial and temporal patterns of daily precipitation extremes, particularly in the East China monsoon region where the intensity and frequency of heavy rainfall events are very high. However, the agreement between the datasets in dry regions such as Tibetan Plateau in the West and the Taklamakan Desert in the Northwest is not strong. An important factor which may have influenced the results is that the ground-based stations from which EA gridded data was produced is very sparse. In the station-rich regions in the East, the performance of PERSIANN-CDR is significant. PERSIANN-CDR slightly underestimates the values of extreme heavy precipitation.