ESRL/PSD Seminar Series

Abstract

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Quantifying accurate instantaneous rainfall intensity is important for many hydrological applications such as flood forecasting, runoff accommodation, erosion prediction, and urban hydrological studies. Having accurate instantaneous precipitation reference products is also very important for verifying precipitation estimates from LEO satellites, such as TRMM and GPM, which suffer from temporal sampling errors.

In this presentation we will present comparisons between instantaneous rainfall rate fields retrieved from individual satellites and from high-resolution ground-based observations at overpass time (snapshot comparisons). Specifically, the instantaneous rainfall rate fields are from 1) TRMM Precipitation Radar and USDA/ARS Walnut Gulch dense rain gauge network, 2) Individual LEO satellites (e.g., AQUA/AMSR-E, NOAA16/AMSU-B, NOAA18/MHS, NOAA19/MHS, MetOp-2A/MHS, TRMM/TMI) and NOAA/NSSL Next Generation QPE high-resolution (1 km, instantaneous) national mosaics (Q2), and 3) TRMM Precipitation Radar and Q2. The Q2 products include the NSSL radar-only national mosaics, with updates every 5 minutes, and the high-resolution gauge adjusted radar national mosaics, which we have developed by applying a gauge correction on the NSSL Q2 products. The Q2 and the gauge-adjusted products provide a breakthrough in the accuracy of large-scale high-resolution surface reference data available for various hydrological applications, and for verification of satellite snapshot observations. Such products will be used for evaluation of the GPM core observations and for error characterization of the multi-satellite products.

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