Hydrologic Assessment of TRMM and GPM-Based Precipitation Products in Transboundary River Catchment (Chenab River, Pakistan)

Abstract

<jats:p>Water resources planning and management depend on the quality of climatic data, particularly rainfall data, for reliable hydrological modeling. This can be very problematic in transboundary rivers with limited disclosing of data among the riparian countries. Satellite precipitation products are recognized as a promising source to substitute the ground-based observations in these conditions. This research aims to assess the feasibility of using a satellite-based precipitation product for better hydrological modeling in an ungauged and riparian river in Pakistan, i.e., the Chenab River. A semidistributed hydrological model of The soil and water assessment tool (SWAT) was set up and two renowned satellite precipitation products, i.e., global precipitation mission (GPM) IMERG-F v6 and tropical rainfall measuring mission (TRMM) 3B42 v7, were selected to assess the runoff pattern in Chenab River. The calibration was done from 2001–2006 with two years of a warmup period. The validation (2007–2010) results exhibit higher correlation between observed and simulated discharges at monthly timescale simulations, IMERG-F (R2 = 0.89, NSE = 0.82), 3B42 (R2 = 0.85, NSE = 0.72), rather than daily timescale simulations, IMERG-F (R2 = 0.66, NSE = 0.61), 3B42 (R2 = 0.64, NSE = 0.54). Moreover, the comparison between IMERG-F and 3B42, shows that IMERG-F is superior to 3B42 by indicating higher R2, NSE and lower percent bias (PBIAS) at both monthly and daily timescale. The results are strengthened by Taylor diagram statistics, which represent a higher correlation (R) and less RMS error between observed and simulated values for IMERG-F. IMERG-F has great potential utility in the Chenab River catchment as it outperformed the 3B42 precipitation in this study. However, its poor skill of capturing peaks at daily timescale remains, leaving a room for IMERG-F to improve its algorithm in the upcoming release.</jats:p>

Evaluation of the CRU TS3.1, APHRODITE_V1101, and CFSR Datasets in Assessing Water Balance Components in the Upper Vakhsh River Basin in Central Asia

“…The correlation coefficients between all three different combinations, the CRU TS3.1 and measurement-based datasets, CFSR and measurement-based datasets, as well as APHRODITE_ V1101 and measurement-based datasets, showed a good performance, meaning that they could be used for hydrological modeling in the UVRB. In many studies, Taylor diagrams have been applied to evaluate the performance of satellite products against observational datasets [75,76].…”

Comparison of flow simulations with sub-daily and daily GPM IMERG products over a transboundary Chenab River catchment

“…Recently, numerous studies have compared the reliability of the GPM-based and other precipitation series on daily and monthly timescales (Lu et al 2018;Su et al 2019;Xu et al 2019;Ahmed et al 2020). For instance, Ahmed et al (2020) compared the daily-based precipitation products (IMERG-F and TRMM (3B42V7)) over the Chenab River catchment and found that IMERG-F has better performance than 3B42V7 for the simulation of daily and monthly flows.…”

Development of Strategy for SWAT Hydrologic Modeling in Data-Scarce Regions of Peru

“…However, these methods have high uncertainty in soil properties estimation because there is a wide range of properties for soils with a similar taxonomy (Di and Kemp 1989;Quesada et al 2010;Narasimhan et al 2012). Global weather data for SWAT (CFSR 2019) or remotely sensed satellite data (e.g., Ercan et al 2015) are often used to overcome the weather data scarcity problem (Dile and Srinivasan 2014;Ahmed et al 2020). But these coarse data sets cannot capture the extreme variability with topography in places like the Peruvian Andes.…”