EGU2020-6642
https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu2020-6642
EGU General Assembly 2020
© Author(s) 2020. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Evaluation of precipitation products based on rain gauge data and water budget in a mountainous river basin, Eastern Tibetan Plateau

Yaozhi Jiang1,2, Kun Yang3,4, Xiaodong Li5, Wenjiang Zhang5, Yan Shen6, Yingying Chen1,4, and Xin Li1,4
Yaozhi Jiang et al.
  • 1National Tibetan Plateau Data Center,Institute of Tibetan Plateau Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing,China
  • 2University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China
  • 3Ministry of Education Key Laboratory for Earth System Modeling, Department of Earth System Science, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China
  • 4CAS Center for Excellence in Tibetan Plateau Earth Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China
  • 5State Key Laboratory of Hydraulics and Mountain River Engineering, Sichuan University, Chengdu, China
  • 6National Meteorological Information Center, China Meteorological Administration, Beijing, China

Precipitation in mountainous areas provides abundant water resources for downstream regions, and reliable precipitation data in these areas is of crucial importance for the management of water resources and water-related disasters. Because in-situ precipitation data are usually scarce in mountainous areas, satellite-based precipitation products are expected to play an important role; however, they should be carefully validated before application. This study evaluated the performance of three high-resolution precipitation products in the mountainous Qingyi River basin, by comparison with both rain gauge-based and water budget-based methods. The basin is located at the eastern margin of the Tibetan Plateau, and has high precipitation leading to high runoff (~1100 mm/year). The three precipitation products are CMPA (the China Merged Precipitation Analysis), IMERG (the Integrated Multi-satellitE Retrievals for GPM) and GSMaP (the Global Satellite Mapping of Precipitation). In general, both rain gauge-based and water budget-based methods showed that CMPA has the highest accuracy and IMERG has the poorest accuracy in this region. In two sub-basins with steep terrain and high precipitation, the rain gauge-based evaluation indicated negative or even positive basin-averaged biases of about 1 mm/day or less, but the water budget analysis indicated that all the products had much larger negative biases, of 2.4 ~ 3.8 mm/day. This difference likely arises because the evaluation based on rain gauge data cannot reflect errors in products at the basin-scale, due to the sparse spatial distribution of rain gauges. Finally, observed altitudinal gradients of precipitation were used to correct the precipitation products. Under this approach the water budget can be better closed but is not always satisfactory. Therefore, developing a high-quality precipitation data set for mountainous regions based only on satellite products and sparse ground observations remains challenging and other data sources (e.g. high-resolution meteorological modeling) should be taken into consideration in future.

How to cite: Jiang, Y., Yang, K., Li, X., Zhang, W., Shen, Y., Chen, Y., and Li, X.: Evaluation of precipitation products based on rain gauge data and water budget in a mountainous river basin, Eastern Tibetan Plateau, EGU General Assembly 2020, Online, 4–8 May 2020, EGU2020-6642, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu2020-6642, 2020