FROGS: a daily 1°  ×  1° gridded precipitation database of rain gauge, satellite and reanalysis products

Abstract

We introduce the Frequent Rainfall Observations on GridS (FROGS) database (Roca et al., 2019). It is composed of gridded daily-precipitation products on a common 1∘×1∘ grid to ease intercomparison and assessment exercises. The database includes satellite, ground-based and reanalysis products. As most of the satellite products rely on rain gauges for calibration, unadjusted versions of satellite products are also provided where available. Each product is provided over its length of record and up to 2017 if available. Quasi-global, quasi-global land-only, ocean-only and tropical-only as well as regional products (over continental Africa and South America) are included. All products are provided on a common netCDF format that is compliant with Climate and Forecast (CF) Convention and Attribute Convention for Dataset Discovery (ACDD) standards. Preliminary investigations of this large ensemble indicate that while many features appear robust across the products, the characterization of precipitation extremes exhibits a large spread calling for careful selection of the products used for scientific applications. All datasets are freely available via an FTP server and identified thanks to the DOI: https://doi.org/10.14768/06337394-73A9-407C-9997-0E380DAC5598.