Evaluating and validating stations and satellite based daily precipitation dataset
About the Project
Daily precipitation is critical for monitoring climate hazards such as floods and droughts, and for running hydrologic and crop water balance models that provide estimates of available water to better manage and utilize water resources. The Climate Hazards Center (CHC) is a global leader in generating precipitation dataset based on satellites and on ground stations. The dataset is called CHIRPS, which stands for Climate Hazards Center InfraRed Precipitation with Stations (CHIRPS) and is a gridded dataset that covers the entire globe, at a spatial resolution of 5km X 5km. CHIRPS version 2.0 has been widely used globally, for monitoring climate hazards and for understanding long-term changes in precipitation.
CHC currently is in the process of developing the latest version of this dataset which is CHIRPS 3.0. The goal of this project is to evaluate the daily precipitation values from this dataset. The evaluation process will involve downloading and processing several independent precipitation datasets that come from diverse sources, to compare them with CHIRPS 3.0, and advanced statistical methods to quantify the performance of the daily CHIRPS 3.0 dataset relative to other datasets. The results of this analysis will be documented and submitted for a peer-reviewed publication.
Student Team
- Lily Li
- Changhee Yoon
- Hannah Li
- Russell Liu
- Fei Du
Mentors
- Dr. Shrad Shukla, UCSB
- Dr. Greg Husak, UCSB
- Enbo Zhou, UCSB
Presentation
About the Sponsor
The Climate Hazards Center is a 19-year-old alliance of multidisciplinary scientists and food security analysts from the UC Santa Barbara Geography Department, Africa, and Latin America working alongside partners in the US Geological Survey (USGS), the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FEWS NET), the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA). This cooperative is unique in its high potential for high-profile international outreach, which includes collaborations with organizations like The Regional Centre for Mapping of Resources for Development (RCMRD), AGRHYMET Regional Centre, IGAD Climate Predicition and Applications Centre (ICPAC), the Southern African Development Community's (SADC) Climate Services (CSC), and the World Food Programme (WFP). .
