Advances in Measurement Technology, Disaster Prevention and
Mitigation – Li & Mohd Yusof (Eds)
© 2023 The Author(s), ISBN: 978-1-032-36087-4
Temporal and spatial characteristics of satellite remote sensing
precipitation data in Naqu, Tibet
Jiarui Hong, Jing Zhang
∗
& Yongyu Song
Beijing Laboratory of Water Resources Security, Beijing, China
Key Laboratory of 3D Information Acquisition and Application of Ministry of Education, Capital Normal
University, Beijing, China
ABSTRACT: Due to the special geographical and topographic conditions of mountainous alpine
areas, the hydro-meteorological monitoring stations are scarce, which makes the measured data
less representative. In order to study the hydrological patterns in the plateau region where data
are severely scarce, this paper compares and evaluates the consistency, detection capability and
spatial and temporal characteristics of the measured precipitation and the multi-source precipi-
tation datasets using the Naqu watershed on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, China as the study area.
The results show that Multi-Source Weather (MSWX) and the China Meteorological Assimila-
tion Driving Datasets (CMADS) are better than Global Precipitation Climatology (GPCP) and the
Precipitation-PERSIANN Climate Data Record (PERSIANN-CDR), among which MSWX is the
best. On the whole, MSWX shows better precipitation inversion accuracy in the Naqu Basin and
has certain applicability. The distribution of precipitation in the Naqu Basin is relatively uneven
among months, and the spatial distribution of annual precipitation in the multi-source precipitation
datasets varies greatly.
1 INTRODUCTION
The watershed area of Naqu is 16822 km
2
, which is the source area of the Nujiang River. Runoff is
mainly derived from precipitation, and the inter-annual variation and regional distribution of runoff
are quite closely related to the variation of precipitation (Gong 2019). However, there is only one
meteorological station in the basin, and there is a lack of long-series precipitation information. The
local livestock industry is the mainstay of development, and the economic level is backward, so
water management needs to improve pasture production to promote economic development. The
scarcity of hydrological information alone to measure precipitation in the area is inadequate to
support water resource management.
Since the accuracy of multi-source precipitation datasets can vary significantly in different
regions due to multiple factors such as topography, climate, estimation algorithms, and the number
of actual measurement stations (Ma 2021). Luo et al. (2011) compared and analyzed the appli-
cability of TRMM-3B42 with station information in the region of China and concluded that the
applicability is higher in the eastern region. Deng et al. (2018) evaluated the accuracy and relia-
bility of MSWE precipitation products in China and found that there is an overall overestimation
phenomenon, and the agreement between MSWEP and the measured data is the lowest in the
southwest region due to the influence of local factors such as topography. Sheng et al. (2021) used
GPM-IMERG to build and calibrate the down-scaling model, which can better reflect the precip-
itation characteristics in the humid region. Chen et al. (2022) selected five precipitation products
to evaluate the applicability to the Yuanjiang-Hongjiang River basin, and the study found that the
accuracy of most precipitation products was related to the elevation.
∗
Corresponding Author:
[email protected]
DOI 10.1201/9781003330172-3 7