Application of hourly radar-gauge merging method for quantitative precipitation estimates

Abstract

Gridded quantitative precipitation estimation (QPE) of high spatial and temporal resolution is now being increasingly used for instance for hydrological modelling. The combination between observations from radar data and in-situ rain-gauge measurement is a popular mean to produce QPEs. Since the QPE generated from radar data only is considered to be not satisfactory, some corrections should be introduced in order to achieve better accuracy of the instant precipitation estimation. The correction method that were used were Mean Field Bias Correction (MFB) and static adjustment. MFB was applied by the assumption that the radar estimation was affected by uniform multiplicative error. The static adjustment was applied to correct radar rainfall data through plotting between radar rainfall and rain gauge so that the regression line between radar and rain gauge was approaching one. The purpose of radar QPE corrections was for hydrological modelling applications.