Performance of high‐resolution satellite precipitation products over China

Abstract

A gauge‐based analysis of hourly precipitation is constructed on a 0.25° latitude/longitude grid over China for a 3 year period from 2005 to 2007 by interpolating gauge reports from ∼2000 stations collected and quality controlled by the National Meteorological Information Center of the China Meteorological Administration. Gauge‐based precipitation analysis is applied to examine the performance of six high‐resolution satellite precipitation estimates, including Joyce et al.'s (2004) Climate Prediction Center Morphing Technique (CMORPH) and the arithmetic mean of the microwave estimates used in CMORPH; Huffman et al.'s (2007) Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) precipitation product 3B42 and its real‐time version 3B42RT; Turk et al.'s (2004) Naval Research Laboratory blended product; and Hsu et al.'s (1997) Precipitation Estimation From Remotely Sensed Information Using Artificial Neural Network (PERSIANN). Our results showed the following: (1) all six satellite products are capable of capturing the overall spatial distribution and temporal variations of precipitation reasonably well; (2) performance of the satellite products varies for different regions and different precipitation regimes, with better comparison statistics observed over wet regions and for warm seasons; (3) products based solely on satellite observations present regionally and seasonally varying biases, while the gauge‐adjustment procedures applied in TRMM 3B42 remove the large‐scale bias almost completely; (4) CMORPH exhibits the best performance in depicting the spatial pattern and temporal variations of precipitation; and (5) both the relative magnitude and the phase of the warm season precipitation over China are estimated quite well, but the early morning peak associated with the Mei‐Yu rainfall over central eastern China is substantially under‐estimated by all satellite products.