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1. Hydrometeorological Observations and Modeling of an Extreme Rainfall Event Using WRF and WRF-Hydro during the RELAMPAGO Field Campaign in Argentina

   https://doi.org/10.1175/JHM-D-20-0133.1  

   Pal, Sujan ; Dominguez, Francina ; Dillon, María Eugenia ; Alvarez, Javier ; Garcia, Carlos Marcelo ; Nesbitt, Stephen W. ; Gochis, David ( February 2021 , Journal of Hydrometeorology)

   null (Ed.)

   Abstract Some of the most intense convective storms on Earth initiate near the Sierras de Córdoba mountain range in Argentina. The goal of the RELAMPAGO field campaign was to observe these intense convective storms and their associated impacts. The intense observation period (IOP) occurred during November–December 2018. The two goals of the hydrometeorological component of RELAMPAGO IOP were 1) to perform hydrological streamflow and meteorological observations in previously ungauged basins and 2) to build a hydrometeorological modeling system for hindcast and forecast applications. During the IOP, our team was able to construct the stage–discharge curves in three basins, as hydrological instrumentation and personnel were successfully deployed based on RELAMPAGO weather forecasts. We found that the flood response time in these river locations is typically between 5 and 6 h from the peak of the rain event. The satellite-observed rainfall product IMERG-Final showed a better representation of rain gauge–estimated precipitation, while IMERG-Early and IMERG-Late had significant positive bias. The modeling component focuses on the 48-h simulation of an extreme hydrometeorological event that occurred on 27 November 2018. Using the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) atmospheric model and its hydrologic component WRF-Hydro as an uncoupled hydrologic model, we developed a system for hindcast, deterministic forecast, and a 60-member ensemble forecast initialized with regional-scale atmospheric data assimilation. Critically, our results highlight that streamflow simulations using the ensemble forecasting with data assimilation provide realistic flash flood forecast in terms of timing and magnitude of the peak. Our findings from this work are being used by the water managers in the region. 

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2. How Well Do Multisatellite Products Capture the Space–Time Dynamics of Precipitation? Part II: Building an Error Model through Spectral System Identification

   https://doi.org/10.1175/JHM-D-22-0041.1  

   Guilloteau, Clement ; Foufoula-Georgiou, Efi ; Kirstetter, Pierre ; Tan, Jackson ; Huffman, George J. ( September 2022 , Journal of Hydrometeorology)

   Satellite precipitation products, as all quantitative estimates, come with some inherent degree of uncertainty. To associate a quantitative value of the uncertainty to each individual estimate, error modeling is necessary. Most of the error models proposed so far compute the uncertainty as a function of precipitation intensity only, and only at one specific spatiotemporal scale. We propose a spectral error model that accounts for the neighboring space–time dynamics of precipitation into the uncertainty quantification. Systematic distortions of the precipitation signal and random errors are characterized distinctively in every frequency–wavenumber band in the Fourier domain, to accurately characterize error across scales. The systematic distortions are represented as a deterministic space–time linear filtering term. The random errors are represented as a nonstationary additive noise. The spectral error model is applied to the IMERG multisatellite precipitation product, and its parameters are estimated empirically through a system identification approach using the GV-MRMS gauge–radar measurements as reference (“truth”) over the eastern United States. The filtering term is found to be essentially low-pass (attenuating the fine-scale variability). While traditional error models attribute most of the error variance to random errors, it is found here that the systematic filtering term explains 48% of the error variance at the native resolution of IMERG. This fact confirms that, at high resolution, filtering effects in satellite precipitation products cannot be ignored, and that the error cannot be represented as a purely random additive or multiplicative term. An important consequence is that precipitation estimates derived from different sources shall not be expected to automatically have statistically independent errors.

   Satellite precipitation products are nowadays widely used for climate and environmental research, water management, risk analysis, and decision support at the local, regional, and global scales. For all these applications, knowledge about the accuracy of the products is critical for their usability. However, products are not systematically provided with a quantitative measure of the uncertainty associated with each individual estimate. Various parametric error models have been proposed for uncertainty quantification, mostly assuming that the uncertainty is only a function of the precipitation intensity at the pixel and time of interest. By projecting satellite precipitation fields and their retrieval errors into the Fourier frequency–wavenumber domain, we show that we can explicitly take into account the neighboring space–time multiscale dynamics of precipitation and compute a scale-dependent uncertainty.

    

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3. Surface temperature comparison of the Arctic winter MOSAiC observations, ERA5 reanalysis, and MODIS satellite retrieval

   https://doi.org/10.1525/elementa.2022.00085  

   Herrmannsdörfer, Lia ; Müller, Malte ; Shupe, Matthew D. ; Rostosky, Philip ( January 2023 , Elementa: Science of the Anthropocene)

   Atmospheric model systems, such as those used for weather forecast and reanalysis production, often have significant and systematic errors in their representation of the Arctic surface energy budget and its components. The newly available observation data of the Multidisciplinary drifting Observatory for the Study of Arctic Climate (MOSAiC) expedition (2019/2020) enable a range of model analyses and validation in order to advance our understanding of potential model deficiencies. In the present study, we analyze deficiencies in the surface radiative energy budget over Arctic sea ice in the ERA5 global atmospheric reanalysis by comparing against the winter MOSAiC campaign data, as well as, a pan-Arctic level-2 MODIS ice surface temperature remote sensing product. We find that ERA5 can simulate the timing of radiatively clear periods, though it is not able to distinguish the two observed radiative Arctic winter states, radiatively clear and opaquely cloudy, in the distribution of the net surface radiative budget. The ERA5 surface temperature over Arctic sea ice has a conditional error with a positive bias in radiatively clear conditions and a negative bias in opaquely cloudy conditions. The mean surface temperature error is 4°C for radiatively clear situations at MOSAiC and up to 15°C in some parts of the Arctic. The spatial variability of the surface temperature, given by 4 observation sites at MOSAiC, is not captured by ERA5 due to its spatial resolution but represented in the level-2 satellite product. The sensitivity analysis of possible error sources, using satellite products of snow depth and sea ice thickness, shows that the positive surface temperature errors during radiatively clear events are, to a large extent, caused by insufficient sea ice thickness and snow depth representation in the reanalysis system. A positive bias characterizes regions with ice thickness greater than 1.5 m, while the negative bias for thinner ice is partly compensated by the effect of snow.

    

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4. Incorporation of Satellite Precipitation Uncertainty in a Landslide Hazard Nowcasting System

   https://doi.org/10.1175/JHM-D-19-0295.1  

   Hartke, Samantha H. ; Wright, Daniel B. ; Kirschbaum, Dalia B. ; Stanley, Thomas A. ; Li, Zhe ( August 2020 , Journal of Hydrometeorology)

   null (Ed.)

   Abstract Many existing models that predict landslide hazards utilize ground-based sources of precipitation data. In locations where ground-based precipitation observations are limited (i.e., a vast majority of the globe), or for landslide hazard models that assess regional or global domains, satellite multisensor precipitation products offer a promising near-real-time alternative to ground-based data. NASA’s global Landslide Hazard Assessment for Situational Awareness (LHASA) model uses the Integrated Multisatellite Retrievals for Global Precipitation Measurement (IMERG) product to issue hazard “nowcasts” in near–real time for areas that are currently at risk for landsliding. Satellite-based precipitation estimates, however, can contain considerable systematic bias and random error, especially over mountainous terrain and during extreme rainfall events. This study combines a precipitation error modeling framework with a probabilistic adaptation of LHASA. Compared with the routine version of LHASA, this probabilistic version correctly predicts more of the observed landslides in the study region with fewer false alarms by high hazard nowcasts. This study demonstrates that improvements in landslide hazard prediction can be achieved regardless of whether the IMERG error model is trained using abundant ground-based precipitation observations or using far fewer and more scattered observations, suggesting that the approach is viable in data-limited regions. Results emphasize the importance of accounting for both random error and systematic satellite precipitation bias. The approach provides an example of how environmental prediction models can incorporate satellite precipitation uncertainty. Other applications such as flood and drought monitoring and forecasting could likely benefit from consideration of precipitation uncertainty. 

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5. PERSIANN-CNN: Precipitation Estimation from Remotely Sensed Information Using Artificial Neural Networks–Convolutional Neural Networks

   https://doi.org/10.1175/JHM-D-19-0110.1  

   Sadeghi, Mojtaba ; Asanjan, Ata Akbari ; Faridzad, Mohammad ; Nguyen, Phu ; Hsu, Kuolin ; Sorooshian, Soroosh ; Braithwaite, Dan ( November 2019 , Journal of Hydrometeorology)

   Accurate and timely precipitation estimates are critical for monitoring and forecasting natural disasters such as floods. Despite having high-resolution satellite information, precipitation estimation from remotely sensed data still suffers from methodological limitations. State-of-the-art deep learning algorithms, renowned for their skill in learning accurate patterns within large and complex datasets, appear well suited to the task of precipitation estimation, given the ample amount of high-resolution satellite data. In this study, the effectiveness of applying convolutional neural networks (CNNs) together with the infrared (IR) and water vapor (WV) channels from geostationary satellites for estimating precipitation rate is explored. The proposed model performances are evaluated during summer 2012 and 2013 over central CONUS at the spatial resolution of 0.08° and at an hourly time scale. Precipitation Estimation from Remotely Sensed Information Using Artificial Neural Networks (PERSIANN)–Cloud Classification System (CCS), which is an operational satellite-based product, and PERSIANN–Stacked Denoising Autoencoder (PERSIANN-SDAE) are employed as baseline models. Results demonstrate that the proposed model (PERSIANN-CNN) provides more accurate rainfall estimates compared to the baseline models at various temporal and spatial scales. Specifically, PERSIANN-CNN outperforms PERSIANN-CCS (and PERSIANN-SDAE) by 54% (and 23%) in the critical success index (CSI), demonstrating the detection skills of the model. Furthermore, the root-mean-square error (RMSE) of the rainfall estimates with respect to the National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) Stage IV gauge–radar data, for PERSIANN-CNN was lower than that of PERSIANN-CCS (PERSIANN-SDAE) by 37% (14%), showing the estimation accuracy of the proposed model.

    

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