Restructuring of high-resolution satellite precipitation products for hydrological modeling

Abstract:

Most river basins of the world lack dense networks of precipitation gauges that produce high-quality precipitation data. In these basins, it is difficult to ensure systematic, unbiased hydrological modeling without relying on other sources of precipitation data. Although especially useful for data-scarce river basins, satellite-based precipitation still contains uncertainties that could propagate through hydrological modeling into simulated results, such as flow and stage. One of the main sources of uncertainty is the gridding process itself, typically associated with geo-statistical adjustments/calibrations founded on various interpolation schemes and ground-based measurements. Thus, the accuracy of a satellite precipitation product is inversely related to its resolution, both spatially and temporally. This also holds true for most gridded global/regional data sets.

This study presents a method that integrates area-conservative regridding with fraction-redistribution to correct the satellite-based CMORPH data set (~8-km resolution and 30-minute time step) using rain-gauge-based APHRODITE (0.25 degree resolution and daily time step). This method can be broadly applied for refining any pairs of gridded data at different resolutions containing complementary information. Inter-comparison of modeled flow between the usage of the prior- and post-corrected CMORPH, APHRODITE, and gauge data is conducted spanning several orders of magnitude for catchments in Southeast Asia.