Satellite Precipitation Characterization, Error Modeling, and Error Correction Using Censored Shifted Gamma Distributions

Abstract

AbstractSatellite multisensor precipitation products (SMPPs) have a variety of potential uses but suffer from relatively poor accuracy due to systematic biases and random errors in precipitation occurrence and magnitude. The censored, shifted gamma distribution (CSGD) is used here to characterize the Tropical Rainfall Measurement Mission Multisatellite Precipitation Analysis (TMPA), a commonly used SMPP, and to compare it against the rain gauge?based North American Land Data Assimilation System phase 2 (NLDAS-2) reference precipitation dataset across the conterminous United States. The CSGD describes both the occurrence and the magnitude of precipitation. Climatological CSGD characterization reveals significant regional differences between TMPA and NLDAS-2 in terms of magnitude and probability of occurrence. A flexible CSGD-based error modeling framework is also used to quantify errors in TMPA relative to NLDAS-2. The framework can model conditional bias as either a linear or nonlinear function of satellite precipitation rate and can produce a ?conditional CSGD? describing the distribution of ?true? precipitation based on a satellite observation. The framework is also used to ?merge? TMPA with atmospheric variables from version 2 of the Modern-Era Retrospective Analysis for Research and Applications (MERRA-2) to reduce SMPP errors. Despite the coarse resolution of MERRA-2, this merging offers robust reductions in random error due to the better performance of numerical models in resolving stratiform precipitation. Improvements in the near-real-time version of TMPA are relatively greater than for the higher-latency research version.