Browse by author
Lookup NU author(s): Dr Jingjing Yu, Dr Xiaofeng Li, Dr Elizabeth Lewis, Dr Stephen Blenkinsop, Professor Hayley Fowler
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).
There is an urgent need for high-quality and high-spatial-resolution hourly precipitation products around the globe, including the UK. Although hourly precipitation products exist for the UK, these either contain large errors, or are insufficient in spatial resolution. An efficient way to solve this is to develop a merged precipitation product that combines the information and benefits from multiple data sources, improving both the spatial resolution and accuracy of hourly precipitation estimates over the UK. In this study, we develop a UK high-resolution gauge–radar–satellite merged hourly precipitation analysis: the UKGrsHP. It covers the UK from 12.5° W to 3.5° E, 49° N–60° N, with a spatial resolution of 0.01° × 0.01° in latitude/longitude (equivalent to 1 km resolution in the mid-latitudes). An optimal interpolation (OI)–based multi-source merging scheme with compound strategy is developed and tested for producing the UKGrsHP. Three input data sources are used: gauge analysis data interpolated from 1903 quality-controlled hourly observations, the UK Nimrod radar precipitation analysis and the GSMaP global satellite precipitation analysis. Using independent tests against ~ 220 independent gauge observations on 1 year’s experimental UKGrsHP, covering the period from January to December 2014, we find that the final merged data performs better than three individual precipitation analyses used as inputs. A full version of the UKGrsHP starting in April 2004 is now under production, which will have wide applications in climate services and scientific research across multiple disciplines.
Author(s): Yu J, Li X-F, Lewis E, Blenkinsop S, Fowler H
Publication type: Article
Publication status: Published
Journal: Climate Dynamics
Year: 2020
Volume: 54
Pages: 2919-2940
Online publication date: 07/02/2020
Acceptance date: 24/01/2020
Date deposited: 09/02/2020
ISSN (print): 0930-7575
ISSN (electronic): 1432-0894
Publisher: Springer Berlin Heidelberg
URL: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-020-05144-2
DOI: 10.1007/s00382-020-05144-2
Notes: This work was supported by the INTENSE project. INTENSE is supported by the European Research Council (Grant ERC-2013-CoG-617329). Hayley Fowler is funded by the Wolfson Foundation and the Royal Society as a Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award holder (Grant WM140025).
Altmetrics provided by Altmetric
