Evaluating Satellite Precipitation Estimates Over Oceans Using Passive Aquatic Listeners

Abstract

Abstract Passive aquatic listeners (PALs) provide high‐quality, high‐resolution estimates of precipitation over ocean regions, but have been underutilized as a reference data set for the evaluation of satellite‐based precipitation estimates (SPEs). PALs are uniquely suited for this purpose due to their 5 km surface listening area when sampling at 1 km depth on drifting Argo Floats, providing rain rate estimates on a spatial scale similar to the native grid spacing of many SPEs. In this study we compare three SPE products (IMERG, CMORPH, and PDIR‐Now) to PAL measurements. Evaluations are performed over tropical, extratropical, and global oceans at SPE native spatiotemporal resolution and longer time scales. We find the SPEs to have rain rate frequency distributions similar to PAL, but with biases and varying performance characteristics that are dependent on region and time scale.