Performance Assessment of Global-EO-Based Precipitation Products against Gridded Rainfall from the Indian Meteorological Department

Monitoring water resources globally is crucial for forecasting future geo-hydro disasters across the Earth. In the present study, an attempt was made to assess the functional dimensionality of multi-satellite precipitation products, retrieved from CHIRPS, NASA POWER, ERA-5, and PERSIANN-CDR with respect to the gridded India Meteorological Department (IMD) precipitation dataset over a period of 30+ years (1990–2021) on monthly and yearly time scales at regional, sub regional, and pixel levels. The study findings showed that the performance of the PERSIANN-CDR dataset was significantly better in Central India, Northeast India, and Northwest India, whereas the NASA-POWER precipitation product performed better in Central India and South Peninsular of India. The other two precipitation products (CHIRPS and ERA-5) showed the intermediate performance over various sub regions of India. The CHIRPS and NASA POWER precipitation products underperformed from the mean value (3.05 mm/day) of the IMD gridded precipitation product, while the other two products ERA-5 and PERSIANN-CDR are over performed across all India. In addition, PERSIANN-CDR performed better in Central India, Northeast India, Northwest India, and the South Peninsula, when the yearly mean rainfall was between 0 and 7 mm/day, while ERA-5 performed better in Central India and the South Peninsula region for a yearly mean rainfall above 0–7 mm/day. Moreover, a peculiar observation was made from the investigation that the respective datasets were able to characterize the precipitation amount during the monsoon in Western Ghats. However, those products needed a regular calibration with the gauge-based datasets in order to improve the future applications and predictions of upcoming hydro-disasters for longer time periods with the very dense rain gauge data. The present study findings are expected to offer a valuable contribution toward assisting in the selection of an appropriate and significant datasets for various studies at regional and zonal scales.