Evaluating the Performance of Secondary Precipitation Products through Statistical and Hydrological Modeling in a Mountainous Tropical Basin of India

Abstract

This paper investigates the performance of gridded rainfall datasets for precipitation detection and streamflow simulations in Indiaʼs Tungabhadra river basin. Sixteen precipitation datasets categorized under gauge-based, satellite-only, reanalysis, and gauge-adjusted datasets were compared statistically against the gridded Indian Meteorological Dataset (IMD) employing two categorical and three continuous statistical metrics. Further, the precipitation datasets’ performance in simulating streamflow was assessed by using the Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) hydrological model. Based on the statistical metrics, Asian Precipitation Highly Resolved Observational Data Integration Towards Evaluation (APHRODITE) furnished very good results in terms of detecting rainfall, followed by Climate Hazards Group Infrared Precipitation (CHIRP), National Centres for Environmental Prediction-Climate Forecast System Reanalysis (NCEP CFSR), Tropical Rainfall Measurement Mission (TRMM) 3B42 v7, Global Satellite Mapping of Precipitation Gauge Reanalysis v6 (GSMaP_Gauge_RNL), and Multisource Weighted Ensemble Precipitation (MSWEP) datasets which had good-to-moderate performances at a monthly time step. From the hydrological simulations, TRMM 3B42 v7, CHIRP, CHIRPS 0.05°, and GSMaP_Gauge_RNL v6 produced very good results with a high degree of correlation to observed streamflow, while Soil Moisture 2 Rain-Climate Change Initiative (SM2RAIN-CCI) dataset exhibited poor performance. From the extreme flow event analysis, it was observed that CHIRP, TRMM 3B42 v7, Global Precipitation Climatology Centre v7 (GPCC), and APHRODITE datasets captured more peak flow events and hence can be further implemented for extreme event analysis. Overall, we found that TRMM 3B42 v7, CHIRP, and CHIRPS 0.05° datasets performed better than other datasets and can be used for hydrological modeling and climate change studies in similar topographic and climatic watersheds in India.