Summer Precipitation Frequency, Intensity, and Diurnal Cycle over China: A Comparison of Satellite Data with Rain Gauge Observations

Abstract

Hourly or 3-hourly precipitation data from Precipitation Estimation from Remotely Sensed Information using Artificial Neural Networks (PERSIANN) and Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) 3B42 satellite products and rain gauge records are used to characterize East Asian summer monsoon rainfall, including spatial patterns in June-August (JJA) mean precipitation amount, frequency, and intensity, as well as the diurnal and semidiurnal cycles. The results show that the satellite products are comparable to rain gauge data in revealing the spatial patterns of JJA precipitation amount, frequency, and intensity, with pattern correlation coefficients for five subregions ranging from 0.66 to 0.94. The pattern correlation of rainfall amount is higher than that of frequency and intensity. Relative to PERSIANN, the TRMM product has a better resemblance with rain gauge observations in terms of both the pattern correlation and rootmean-square error. The satellite products overestimate rainfall frequency but underestimate its intensity. The diurnal (24 h) harmonic dominates subdaily variations of precipitation over most of eastern China. A late-afternoon maximum over southeastern and northeastern China and a near-midnight maximum over the eastern periphery of the Tibetan Plateau are seen in the rain gauge data. The diurnal phases of precipitation frequency and intensity are similar to those of rainfall amount in most regions, except for the middle Yangtze River valley. Both frequency and intensity contribute to the diurnal variation of rainfall amount over most of eastern China. The contribution of frequency to the diurnal cycle of rainfall amount is generally overestimated in both satellite products. Both satellite products capture well the nocturnal peak over the eastern periphery of the Tibetan Plateau and the late-afternoon peak in southern and northeastern China. Rain gauge data over the region between the Yangtze and Yellow Rivers show two peaks, with one in the early morning and the other later in the afternoon. The satellite products only capture the major late-afternoon peak.

Diurnal Variation of Rainfall Associated with Tropical Depression in South China and its Relationship to Land-Sea Contrast and Topography

“…Note that the rainfall intensity and frequency both reach their peak during the late-afternoon hours in the inland region (Figure 15e). This result is similar to that of Zhou et al [13], who revealed that the diurnal rainfall in summer (June to August) had a late-afternoon maximum in southern China. The intensity of rainfall associated with TD in the present study, however, shows a morning maximum along the coast (Figure 3c), and its frequency has a late-afternoon maximum in the inland region (Figure 3e).…”

“…The time step is set to 30 s. As is known to meteorologists around the world, it is very difficult to obtain an accurate track and rainfall simulation for a 10-day TD through continuous model integration, despite some successful studies that have conducted long-time numerical simulations to investigate the diurnal rainfall cycle [9,26]. Considering the fact that the observed features of the diurnal rainfall cycle are obtained by averaging hourly TRMM-estimated or surface rain-gauge rainfall [8,13,45], an alternative method is adopted in this study. Ten simulations have been done in this study to cover the 10-day period of the case, with each simulation being initialized at 2000 BLT (1200 UTC) and integrated for 36 h. The last 24-h results are used for analysis, while the first 12-h results are discarded to alleviate the model spin-up impacts.…”

Diurnal variation of summer precipitation over the Tibetan Plateau: a cloud-resolving simulation

“…Harmonic analysis (Roy and Balling, 2005) was used to examine the diurnal time series of 3 h-accumulated rainfall averaged in July 2003 (the measurable precipitation defined was >0.02 mm h −1 for the simulated precipitation and TRMM observation (Zhou et al, 2008).…”

Evaluation of global fine-resolution precipitation products and their uncertainty quantification in ensemble discharge simulations

“…Evaluation of GLDAS data has generally been limited to the United States and other observationrich regions of the world (Kato et al, 2007); assessments and applications in other regions are rare (Wang et al, 2011;Zhou et al, 2013). The APHRODITE, PERSIANN, and GSMAP products are seldom evaluated in northeast China using basin-scale gauge data (Zhou et al, 2008). Owing to the high heterogeneity of rainfall across a variety of spatiotemporal scales, the uncertainty characteristics of precipitation products are variable (Asadullah et al, 2008;Dinku et al, 2008;Nikolopoulos et al, 2010;Pan et al, 2010).…”