Long-Term Daily Gridded Precipitation Dataset for Asia and Its Use for Climate Monitoring

Precipitation is one of the most fundamental meteorological elements influencing our society widely and significantly. It is necessary for our everyday life as water resources, while too much of it causes disasters such as floods and landslides. Meanwhile, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Fifth Assessment Report (IPCC AR5) says that “Extreme precipitation events over most of the mid-latitude land masses and over wet tropical regions will very likely become more intense and more frequent by the end of this century, as global mean surface temperature increases”. Under global warming progress, it is demanded that climate services (information of the current climate state and forecast) be enhanced to contribute to reduce some risks caused by extreme precipitation.

The Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA) has been operationally monitoring world’s climate state especially in Asia using SYNOP and CLIMAT messages, which report real-time and monthly weather observations, respectively. Some of the outcomes are presented in our website (http://ds.data.jma.go.jp/tcc/tcc/). However, in order to assess extreme precipitation, current products cannot be said to be sufficient, so now we are planning to improve climate monitoring products by using new observational data such as APHRODITE precipitation dataset (APHRO_PR).

APHRODITE (Asian Precipitation -- Highly-Resolved Observational Data Integration Towards Evaluation of Water Resources) created long-term (1951-2007) and high-horizontal resolution (0.25 degree) daily precipitation data for Asia, utilizing a huge number of rain-gauge data with state-of-the-art interpolation method considering of climatology and topography. The datasets (Yatagai et al., 2009, 2012; Kamiguchi et al., 2010) have been used by more than 5,000 users for mostly research purposes, such as evaluation of climate models and river discharge models.

Although this project ended in 2011, a successor project “APHRODITE-2” has been launched since June 2016, aiming to improve reproducibility of extreme precipitation and homogeneity during the period it covers. We, JMA cooperate with APHRODITE-2 to improve data quality to the certain level that can be used to operational climate monitoring. In this session, we will introduce an overview of APHRODITE-2 project and climate monitoring products using APHRO_PR.