Performance Assessment of Chirps, Persiann – CDR, IMERG, and TMPA Precipitation Products across Nepal

Abstract

The observation of hydrological as well as meteorological data is very essential for any kind of hydraulic and hydrological study. In Nepal, due to the significant variation of topography and climatic characteristics as well it is necessary to establish the meteorological stations densely, here only 231 meteorological stations are available and are handled by government organizations Department of Hydrology and Meteorology (DHM).  Even though, due to many limitations, the satellite data is very useful for the water resources study. There are so many satellite products available but the performance of these products varies from place to place. In this study, the performance of four satellite products i.e., Climate Hazards Group Infrared Precipitation with Station data (CHIRPS), Precipitation Estimation from Remotely Sensed Information using Artificial Neural Networks (PERSIANN-CDR), Integrated Multi-Satellite Retrievals for GPM (IMERG), and TRMM Multi-satellite Precipitation Analysis (TMPA) all over Nepal are evaluated with different elevation bands. The performance of each product is evaluated by Probability of Detection (POD), Critical Success Index (CSI), Frequency Bias Index (FBI), False Alarm Ratio (FAR), Root Mean Square Error (RMSE), and Percentage Bias (PBIAS). After analysis of each product, the PERSIANN-CDR data set gives a reasonable performance for all elevation bands after bias correction.