Assessment of the two satellite-based precipitation products TRMM and RFE rainfall records using ground based measurements

Abstract

In several research domains, the precipitation products produced based on the Satellite images are used because of their advantage of high spatiotemporal resolution and near-global coverage. And still the products applications are limited according to the uncertainty. To facilitate using these products, it’s vital to identify and quantify their error characteristics. The objective of this study is to evaluate the two satellite-based precipitation products; RainFall Estimate (RFE) and Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) using ground gauge-based rainfall measurements throughout the Blue Nile River sub-basin in the Sudan for the period (2001–2016). The importance of this study comes from the discontinuity of the ground data due to some difficulties such as the accessibility of the region’s topography, in addition to the poorly gauged areas. Therefore, estimating the amount of rain from verified satellites is useful to obtain the pattern of rainfall that could be used in hydrological models to provide river discharges forecasts and to specify areas of flood hazard. For a quantified evaluation of satellite-based precipitation products, continuous Mean Error (ME), and Correlation Coefficient (CC) were used. The results show that RFE and TRMM products performing well in estimating and observing rainfall over the study area.