A gridded monthly precipitation merged rain gauge and satellite analysis dataset for the Tianshan Mountains between 1981 and 2019

Abstract

Accurate and reliable precipitation product on regular grids is essential for understanding trends and variability within climate studies, for weather forecasting, and in hydrology and agrometeorology applications. However, the construction of high-resolution spatiotemporal precipitation grid product is challenging for complex terrain with sparse rain gauge networks and when only coarse spatial resolutions of satellite data are available. The objective of this study was to consequently provide a practical method to create grid precipitation product by merging accurate quantitative observations from weather stations with continuous spatial information and from satellite-based estimate product. The new gridded precipitation product exhibits a monthly temporal resolution and a spatial resolution of 0.01° for the Tianshan Mountains, while extending back to 1981. To overcome the limitation of low densities and sparse distributions of meteorological stations in the complex terrain of the Tianshan Mountains, a suitable interpolation of ANUSPLIN was used to interpolate grid precipitation based on in situ data. The interpolation grid precipitation was then merged with the satellite precipitation product developed by the U.S. Geological Survey and the Climate Hazards Group. After evaluation and validation using withheld stations and comparison to reference datasets, the result indicated that the merged product exhibit considerable promise for application in complex terrain. The method can be widely applied and is expected to construct precipitation product with high spatial and temporal resolution by merging multiple precipitation data sources.