Evaluation of Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) satellite precipitation products for drought monitoring over the middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze River Basin, China

Abstract

Drought is one of the most frequent and widespread natural disasters and has tremendous agricultural, ecological, societal, and economic impacts. Among the many drought indices, the standardized precipitation index (SPI) based on monthly precipitation data is simple to calculate and has multiscale characteristics. To evaluate the applicability of high spatiotemporal resolution satellite precipitation products for drought monitoring, based on the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) products and station-based meteorological data, the SPI values at different time scales (1, 3, 6, and 12 months) were calculated for the period of 1998-2016 in the middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze River Basin (MLRYRB). The temporal correlations show that there is a high degree of consistency between calculations at the different time scales (1, 3, 6 and 12 months) based on the two data sources and that the amplitude of fluctuations decreases with increasing time scale. In addition, the Mann-Kendall (MK) test method was applied to analyze the trends from 1998 to 2016, and the results suggest that wetting trends clearly prevailed over drying trends. Moreover, a correlation analysis of the two data sources based on 60 meteorological stations was performed with the SPI values at different time scales. The correlation coefficients at the short time scales (1, 3, and 6 months) are all greater than 0.7, and the correlation coefficient at the long time scale (12 months) is greater than 0.5. In summary, the results demonstrate that the TRMM 3B43 precipitation product provides a new data source that can be used for reliable drought monitoring in the MLRYRB.

Meteorological Drought in Northwestern Escarpment of Ethiopian Rift Valley: detection seasonal and spatial trends

“…Drought is a recurrent natural phenomenon that occurs in most parts of the globe, even in the wet and humid regions (Dai 2011;He et al 2011;Masih et al 2014;Tian 2019;Zarei 2019). It is one of the natural disasters that extensively damage the environment and the economy in several ways (e.g., agriculture, water resources, ecologies, human welfare, and animal life) (Mavromatis 2012; Lu et al 2015;Chen et al 2020;Yacoub and Tayfur 2020). According to the Emergency Events Database (EM-DAT 2014), approximately 642 drought events were reported across the globe in the period 1900-2013.…”

Suitability of TRMM Products with Different Temporal Resolution (3-Hourly, Daily, and Monthly) for Rainfall Erosivity Estimation

“…Moreover, TRMM Multi-satellite Precipitation Analysis (TMPA) combined the data from TRMM-PR, VIRS, TMI with passive microwave, infrared and visible measurements available from national and international satellites, and could provide rainfall data series with the temporal resolution of 3-hourly and spatial resolution of 0.25 • × 0.25 • at the coverage area of global 50 • S to 50 • N [28,29]. Numerous studies have validated that TRMM products have acceptable accuracy [28,29,[33][34][35][36][37][38], and good performance has been achieved using TRMM rainfall data in many research fields, including hydrological modeling [33,[39][40][41][42][43][44][45], rainfall characteristics [35,46,47], weather processes [48,49], latent heat flux [50][51][52], extreme precipitation [53,54], and drought/flood monitoring [55][56][57][58][59][60].…”

Preliminary Utility of the Retrospective IMERG Precipitation Product for Large-Scale Drought Monitoring over Mainland China

“…Temporal distributions of CCs and RMSEs of the regional mean IMERG-based SPI6 and regional ratio of drought area quantified by the IMERG-based SPI6 for R1-R6 according to Figure 6 and spatial CCs and RMSEs of the representative drought process in southern China for the R2-R5 according to Figure 7. Spatial maps of the drought events roughly identified by the IMERG-based SPI6 and gauge-based SPI6 in specific consecutive months for southern China are exhibited in Figure 7, where they describe a light−extreme−light drought process from March 2011 to June 2011 [57] and crippling drought in April and May. Southern China is a major agricultural production base and includes multitudinous prosperous urban areas, which encompassed R2-R5 in this study.…”