Abstract:
We present the new Precipitation REtrieval covering the TIbetan Plateau (PRETIP) as a
feasibility study using the two geostationary (GEO) satellites Elektro-L2 and Insat-3D with reference
to the GPM(Global PrecipitationMeasurementMission) IMERG (IntegratedMulti-satellitE Retrievals
for GPM) product. The present study deals with the assignment of the rainfall rate. For precipitation
rate assignment, the best-quality precipitation estimates from the gauge calibrated microwave (MW)
within the IMERG product were combined with the GEO data by Random Forest (RF) regression.
PRETIP was validated with independent MWprecipitation information not considered for model
training and revealed a good performance on 30 min and 11 km spatio-temporal resolution with a
correlation coefficient of R = 0.59 and outperforms the validation of the independentMWprecipitation
with IMERG’s IR only product (R = 0.18). A comparison of PRETIP precipitation rates in 4 km
resolution with daily rain gauge measurements from the Chinese Ministry of Water Resources
revealed a correlation of R = 0.49. No differences in the performance of PRETIP for various elevation
ranges or between the rainy (July, August) and the dry (May, September) season could be found.
