Development of a Merged Precipitation Product for the Automated Multi-Radar Multi-Sensor System

There are numerous challenges related to quantitative precipitation estimation (QPE) in areas of poor radar coverage, including overshooting precipitation features in regions of sparse radar coverage and the inability to sample precipitation in regions of complex terrain. A merged QPE product is being developed within the Multi-Radar Multi-Sensor (MRMS) system to provide improved precipitation estimates across the MRMS domain, especially west of -100.00W longitude. This MRMS merged product, denoted as Q3RM, combines the MRMS Local Gauge Corrected Radar QPE (Q3GC) with the gauge plus precipitation climatology product called the Mountain Mapper Precipitation Accumulation (Q3MM). The weight of each product in Q3RM is primarily dependent upon radar coverage through the use of a Radar Quality Index (RQI) product, environmental conditions related to winter precipitation, and the influence of gauge observations based on estimated surface precipitation classifications. Statistical evaluations of Q3RM performance are being conducted over a two-year period and during select precipitation events using independent Community Collaborative Rain, Hail & Snow (CoCoRaHS) daily gauge observations. This presentation will discuss the development of the logic used to generate the Q3RM product, including a developmental version of RQI employed in the merging scheme to provide more seamless transitions between QPE sources. The presentation will also provide some preliminary results of the Q3RM product and future work related to merging QPE sources in MRMS.