Evaluation of the AMSU-A,B Hydro-Bundle Suite of Products for Hydrological and Climate Applications

In this work, we evaluate the AMSU-A,B, Hydro-bundle product from the Reference Environmental Data Records (REDR) program. The AMSU-A,B, Hydro-bundle is an 11-year record of rain rate over land and ocean, snow cover and surface temperature over land, and sea ice concentration, cloud liquid water, and total precipitable water over ocean among others. The AMSU-A,B, Hydro-bundle will be evaluated against other satellite based precipitation products already part of the REDR program such as PERSIANN-CDR (Precipitation Estimation from Remotely Sensed Information using an Artificial Neural Network-Climate Data Record), GPCP (Global Precipitation Climatology Project), and CMORPH-CDR (CPC MORPHing technique-CDR). Those products provide long-term Quantitative Precipitation Estimates (QPEs). PERSIANN-CDR is a 30-year record of daily-adjusted global precipitation. GPCP is an approximately 30-year record of monthly and pentad adjusted global precipitation and 17-year record of daily-adjusted global precipitation. CMORPH-CDR is a 17-year record of daily and sub-daily adjusted global precipitation.

The aim of this work is to evaluate the ability of the AMSU-A,B Hydro-bundle to capture precipitation patterns on a global scale. The AMSU-A,B evaluation and products inter-comparisons will be performed at various temporal and spatial scales over the concurrent period of record (11-year). With respect to precipitation, this evaluation will also include trend analysis and comparison with in-situ data sets at the daily scale from the Global Historical Climatology Network (GHCN-Daily) and from the Global Precipitation Climatology Centre (GPCC) gridded daily product. In addition, while the products mentioned above only provide QPEs, the AMSU-A,B hydro-bundle provides additional hydrological information (precipitable water, cloud liquid water, snow cover, sea ice concentration …). The second part of this work, will present an analysis of those additional variables available from global satellite measurements and their relevance and complementarity in the context of long-term hydrological and climate studies.