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GPCC/Level-3 MRMS

Comparisons of precipitation from GPCC and Level-3 MRMS

GPCC

The Global Precipitation Climatology Centre (GPCC) is operated by Germany's National Meteorological Service, the Deutscher Wetterdienst(DWD) under the auspices of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). GPCC provides global precipitation analyses for monitoring and research of the earth's climate. For more information about GPCC, visit https://www.dwd.de/EN/ourservices/gpcc/gpcc.html

This study utilizes the GPCC Full Data Daily Version 2018, Daily Land-Surface Precipitation from Rain-Gauges built on GTS-based and Historic Data at 1-deg resolution. As of this analysis, this product is available from 1988 to 2016.

Comparisons with MRMS

The comparisons are conducted over the CONUS (25N-50N, 125W-65W) using above GPCC data and level-3 MRMS data during the commonly available periods from Jun 2014 to Dec 2016 except for Jan-May 2016 when MRMS data are missing.
Note there are also quite a few MRMS missings in other periods.

MRMS precipitation data at 30-min and 0.01-deg resolution are QCed by applying following conditions:
RQI=100, 0.5<=ratio<=2, liquid precipitation only (no snow/frozen precipitation)

Then the QCed 30-min/0.01-deg MRMS precipitation data are resampled to 1-deg daily resolution. The daily precipitation is estimated when at least 50% of time is available; otherwise, it is set to missing.

Two methods are used in converting MRMS precipitation from 0.01-deg to 1-deg grids. (1) Congrid, a build-in IDL function. This is basically used as the nearest neighbor sampling in this analysis.
(2) simpleAve, simply avearge all valid 0.01-deg data to 1-deg grid.

The density plots for daily and monthly precipitation from MRMS (congrid and simpleAve) and GPCC are provided below.

  • Density plot for daily (1o) precipitation
  • Density plots for GPCC vs QCed MRMS (both precipitation >=0.1 mm/d).
  • Density plot for monthly (1o) precipitation
  • Monthly precipitation is accumulated from daily data in the month when at least 15 days of data are available.
  • Daily precipitation [mm] contours
  • Daily MRMS precipitation is accumulated from the above QCed half-hourly data at 0.01 deg resolution and then resampled to 1-deg resolution.
    Visit this page for un-QCed MRMS precipitation contours.


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