The Need for Robust and Accurate Precipitation Gauge Metadata for Radar-Based QPE

Precipitation gauges are widely considered as the “ground truth” and are used in various applications for the modification and verification of quantitative precipitation estimates (QPE) as well as other hydrometeorological applications. Automated hourly gauge observations are used to generate gauge-based QPEs and locally bias correct radar-based QPE within the Multi-Radar Multi-Sensor (MRMS) system. Limitations and challenges with the measurement of precipitation are well known; however, there are other issued related to the metadata of gauges and how it can influence the generation and validation of QPE products. This presentation will address a series of issues with gauge metadata and the need for a robust and accurate metadata set for gauge quality control, QPE generation, and product validation within the context of the MRMS system. Topics include accurate latitude and longitude values as well as other siting challenges, the complexities of removing duplicate observations across multiple ingested network sources, and the need for instrumentation weather data within the metadata files for the quality control and correction of gauge observations.