DESEMPENHO DO SATÉLITE TRMM NA ESTIMATIVA DE PRECIPITAÇÃO SOBRE A BACIA DO PARAGUAI SUPERIOR

Abstract

The Higher Paraguai river, a tributary of the Upper Paraguai Basin, generates a significative share of the flows that maintains the natural oscillation between floods and droughts in the Pantanal. However, a precise estimation of its rainfall variability is uncertain, due to the low number of rain gauges at the basin. Thus, areal estimates of precipitation obtained from remote sensing can become a very useful data source. Such estimates, although not as precise as punctual measurements, have the advantage to give very fair representations of spatial distribution of rain.In this work, we analysed rain fields and mean rain heights derived from the Tropical RainfallMeasuring Mission (TRMM) satellite. Comparisons with ground data area made to the Upper Paraguai Basin, limited by the flow gauge of Descalvados. Results are very promising, showing that rain estimates provided by this satellite can be a reliable data source for basins with strong scarcity of data.

Keywords

• satellite-estimated precipitation
• TRMM
• upper Paraguai Basin.