Hydrological Assessment of the Latest Multi-Satellite Precipitation Products: A Case Study for the Qinhuai River Basin in China.

Several high-spatiotemporal-resolution satellite-based precipitation products have been released to provide uninterrupted precipitation time series with quasi-global coverage since the last decade, which thus offer a potential alternative or supplement to ground-based rainfall estimates for hydrometeorological applications and climate studies in sparsely gauged or ungauged basins. This study aims to comprehensively evaluate five of the latest satellite QPEs, including NASA's Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) 3B42V7 product, Precipitation Estimation from Remotely Sensed Information using an Artificial Neural Network-Climate Data Record (PERSIANN), NOAA's Climate Prediction Center (CPC) MORPHing technique (CMORPH) satellite precipitation merged with weather stations developed by the China Meteorological Administration (CMA-CMORPH), Multi-source Weighted-Ensemble Precipitation (MSWEP) and Climate Hazards Group Infra-Red Precipitation with station data (CHIRPS). These five satellite QPEs are statistically evaluated over the Qinhuai River basin during 2008-2016 and applied into the Liuxihe distributed hydrological model for detailed streamflow simulation to assess hydrologic utilities. Mann-Kendal and Sen's slope methods were employed to analyze the streamflow simulation on daily monthly and seasonally basis. The results show that the satellite-gauge rainfall product can better capture the rainfall distribution and general streamflow pattern at rainfall intensity less than 25 mm/day. The simulated streamflow driven by the satellite-gauge rainfall had relatively better agreement with observations for peak flow, but the total water amount was less than the streamflow estimated based on the raingauges on average. However, TRMM and MSWEP are more appropriate for the long term streamflow analysis, due to the simulation were highly correlated to actual flow on annual basis. All sources performing well during seasonal analysis, except PERSIANN was not encouraging to use during summer. Overall, CMA-CMORPH and MSWEP showed great potential to improve the precipitation distribution and hydrometeorological simulations, and can serve as an alternative high quality QPEs for driving a distributed hydrological model at multiple time scales in China.