EVALUATION OF SATELLITE BASED NEAR-REAL TIME PRECIPITATION ESTIMATION OVER URBAN AREA

Agilan V, Umamahesh N V

Abstract: The flood damage potential in urban area is high and the accurate flood/rainfall forecasting will reduce the damage caused by urban flooding. For flood forecasting, there is a need for proper knowledge on time distribution of rainfall in real time basis and this can be achieved based on near real time satellite rainfall estimates. In this paper, the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) near real time rainfall product, TRMM-3B42 RT v7, is validated using Indian Meteorological Department (IMD) hourly gauge observation of Hyderabad city, India. 3-h cumulative rainfall is calculated from hourly observed rainfall and compared with TRMM 3-h rainfall estimates. Our results indicate that the TRMM-3B42 RT v7 gridded 3 hour precipitation is overestimating the rainfall intensity and it is underestimating high intensity (>17.6 mm/3-h) rainfall events. Further, the TRMM is mostly missing the small rainfall events having intensity less than 0.2 mm/3-h.

Keywords: Evaluation, High Intensity Rainfall, Near-Real Time, TRMM, Urban area

DOI: https://doi.org/10.15623/ijret.2015.0423005