The magnitude and frequency of detected precipitation determine the accuracy performance of precipitation data sets in the high mountains of Asia

Abstract

Abstract The grid-based precipitation dataset is an important source for studying precipitation change in the high mountains of Asia due to where precipitation stations are sparse. It is essential to evaluate the accuracy of grid-based precipitation datasets in the high mountains of Asia before selecting an appropriate grid-based dataset. Therefore, this study comprehensively evaluated the precipitation errors of four commonly utilized precipitation datasets (multi-source weighted-ensemble precipitation (MSWEP), global precipitation climatology centre (GPCC), global precipitation measurement (GPM), and soil moisture to rain-advanced scatterometer (SM2RAIN-ASCAT)) in the high mountains of Asia from temporal and spatial perspectives. It then decomposed the precipitation errors to reveal their sources. The results showed that MSWEP, GPCC, GPM, and SM2RAIN-ASCAT overestimated precipitation amount and probability compared with station observations. Meanwhile, all precipitation data sets except MSWEP data underestimated precipitation in the dry season. In terms of the average values of the error metrics, GPCC performed the best. There was an evident annual periodicity in the error assessment metrics for the four precipitation data sets. Multiple linear regression analysis revealed that four precipitation-related factors (false alarm precipitation, missed amount of precipitation, precipitation detected presented, and precipitation detected event) explained the root mean square error values for four precipitation data sets, with precipitation detected presented having the largest weight. The root mean square error of each product exhibits periodic fluctuations with changes in precipitation quantity, attributed to the occurrences of precipitation detected presented and precipitation detected events. These findings provide useful reference information for correcting biases in precipitation data sets for high mountains of Asia.

Keywords

• Precipitation data sets
• Precipitation retrieval errors
• Accuracy assessment metrics
• Sources of errors
• High Mountain Asia