Hydrologic Evaluation of Integrated Multi-satellitE Retrivals for GPM over Tar Basin in Eastern Continuous United States

Integrated Multi-satellitE Retrievals for the Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) mission (IMERG) is the state-of-art precipitation product with high spatio-temporal resolution of 0.1°/30min. Precipitation derived from the core sensors dual-frequency precipitation radar (DPR) and microwave imager (GMI) on board a “Core” satellite is unified in IMERG. Additionally, IMERG blends the advantages of currently most popular satellite-based quantitative precipitation estimates (QPE) algorithms, i.e. TRMM Multi-satellite Precipitation Analysis (TMPA), Climate Prediction Center morphing technique (CMORPH), Precipitation Estimation from Remotely Sensed Information using Artificial Neural Networks-Cloud Classification System (PERSIANN-CCS). The real-time and post real-time IMERG products are now available online at https://stormpps.gsfc.nasa.gov/storm. In this study, the real-time and final run post real-time IMERG products are hydrologically evaluated with Stage IV as reference over Tar River basin in eastern United States since March 2014 with hydrologic model Variable Infiltration Capacity (VIC). The simulated stream flow with IMERG will be compared to the observed stream flow with statistics metrics Relative Bias (RB), Root-Mean-Squared Error (RMSE), Correlation Coefficient (CC), Probability Of Detection (POD), False Alarm Ratio (FAR), Critical Success Index (CSI), and Nash-Sutcliffe (NSCE) index. The performance of IMERG in floods simulation is highlighted in the study. This timely hydrologic evaluation with is expected to offer insights into performance of IMERG and thus provide useful feedback to the IMERG algorithm developers and the hydrologic users.