Assessing reliability of precipitation data over the Mekong River Basin: A comparison of ground-based, satellite, and reanalysis datasets

• Accurate precipitation data are the basis for hydro-climatological studies. As a highly populated river basin, with the biggest inland fishery in Southeast Asia, freshwater dynamics is extremely important for the Mekong River Basin (MB). This study focuses on evaluating the reliability of existing gridded precipitation datasets both from satellite and reanalysis, with a ground observations-based gridded precipitation dataset as the reference. Two satellite products (Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission [TRMM] and the Precipitation Estimation from Remote Sensing Information using an Artificial Neural NetworkClimate Data Record [PERSIANN-CDR]), as well as three reanalysis products (Modern-Era Retrospective analysis for Research and Applications [MERRA2], the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts interim reanalysis [ERA-Interim], and the Climate Forecast System Reanalysis [CFSR]) were compared with the Asian PrecipitationHighly Resolved Observational Data Integration Towards Evaluation of Water Resources (APHRODITE) over the MB. The APHRODITE was chosen as the reference for the comparison because it was developed based on ground observations and has also been selected as reference data in previous studies. Results show that most of the assessed datasets are able to capture the major climatological characteristics of precipitation in the MB for the 10-year study period (1998-2007). Generally, both satellite data (TRMM and PERSIANN-CDR) show higher reliability than reanalysis products at both spatial and temporal scales across the MB, with the TRMM outperforming when compared to the PERSIANN-CDR. For the reanalysis products, MERRA2 is more reliable in terms of temporal variability, but with some underestimation of precipitation. The other two reanalysis products CFSR and ERA-Interim are relatively unreliable due to large overestimations. CFSR is better positioned to capture the spatial variability of precipitation, while ERA-Interim shows inconsistent spatial patterns but more realistically resembles the daily precipitation probability. These findings have practical implications for future hydro-climatological studies.

Subject headings

NATURVETENSKAP  -- Geovetenskap och miljövetenskap -- Meteorologi och atmosfärforskning (hsv//swe)

NATURAL SCIENCES  -- Earth and Related Environmental Sciences -- Meteorology and Atmospheric Sciences (hsv//eng)

Keyword

Mekong River Basin

precipitation evaluation

rain gauge observations

reanalysis data

satellite data

rain-gauge observations

hydrological cycle

wavelet analysis

tibetan

plateau

dense network

analysis tmpa

time-series

products

climate

performance

Meteorology & Atmospheric Sciences

n ml

2017

water-sui

v9

Publication and Content Type

ref (subject category)

art (subject category)