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The Global Precipitation Climatology Project (GPCP): Current Status and Transfer to Operations at NCDC
Abstract
Homogenized, quality controlled datasets are hugely important for studies wishing to accurately quantify trends and variability in the global climate system. As such, the creation and routine production of Climate Data Records (CDRs) for essential climate variables such as precipitation has become a high priority for the climate community. One such example of a long-standing CDR is the Global Precipitation Climatology Project (GPCP) which has been in continuous production since the late 1990s and offers a 33+ year record of globally complete precipitation by merging the highest quality satellite and gauge estimates to produce a the highest quality, homogenous dataset. The GPCP datasets (monthly, pentad and daily) are very heavily used with over 1500 journal citations.
A project is currently underway, funded by NOAA's National Climatic Data Center (NCDC), to transfer routine processing (and reprocessing) from the various GPCP centers to a single processing center at NCDC. The multi-sensor nature of GPCP is its primary strength, but the collection and merger of these different input datasets provides a unique challenge. Up to now, the processing of GPCP has been executed at several different centers where experts are able to process and check data and then supply rainfall rates to the merge center. In many cases, this involves a high level of manual intervention in both running and quality controlling the products. The NCDC project involves streamlining and better organizing the legacy code that handles every aspect (from brightness temperature to final product) of GPCP v2.2 and transferring that code to NCDC for full archive of the GPCP. Automated quality assurance checks will be a part of the NCDC system.
One of the goals of transferring operations to NCDC is that it will allow the GPCP team to focus on the development of the next generation of merged precipitation datasets (GPCP V3). This presentation will outline the goals and current progress of the effort to transfer V2.2 to NOAA/NCDC as well as outlining some of the plans for the next generation of GPCP.
... Precipitation datasets from the GPCP (Global Precipitation Climatology Project; Adler et al. 2003; https:// www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/data/gridded/data.gpcc.html) are widely used precipitation datasets whose reliability has been evaluated by many researchers (Curtis and Adler 2000;Nie et al. 2012;Yan et al. 2013;Sapiano et al. 2013). The results show that GPCP is reliable in arid/semiarid regions (Adler et al. 2001;Abushandi and Merkel 2011;Nastos 2011). ...
Local moisture recycling (precipitation recycling) plays a crucial role in precipitation. However, evapotranspiration, the key to precipitation recycling, is difficult to estimate. In this study, restrictions between the evapotranspiration ability and soil moisture (SM) supply are considered, and evapotranspiration estimations from 1981 to 2010 in Afro-Eurasia are examined. The results show that the improved evapotranspiration estimation obtained by correcting the potential evapotranspiration in Afro-Eurasia, especially in the Asia-Africa arid regions, ranges from 0.2 to 1.2 mm day⁻¹, which was less than that obtained using the traditional Penman-Monteith evapotranspiration (PET, which ranges from 1.0 to approximately 11.0 mm day⁻¹). Based on different evapotranspiration estimations, the characteristics of the precipitation recycling ratio (PRR) calculated using the dynamic recycling model (DRM) are analyzed and compared for three arid regions in the Asian-African continent, China-Mongolia (CM), West Asia (WA), and North Africa (NAF), during the precipitation season. A comparison with the results from the PET method reveals that the estimated evapotranspiration and precipitation recycling obtained using the corrected approach was more reasonable than that obtained using the Penman-Monteith method. Overall, the PRR in CM (about 0.7%) and NAF (about 0.5%) shows decreasing trends, whereas the PRR in WA (about 1.0%) increased, which implies that because the local moisture supply increased in WA and reduced in CM and NAF, the drought intensity increased in WA but weakened in CM and NAF. This trend was partially related to increased precipitation recycling that occurred with increased evapotranspiration in WA. Moreover, the negative PRR trend and alleviated drought intensity in CM and NAF implied that precipitation recycling had a negative effect when there was less local moisture supply in the region, and this alleviated the drought intensity in the Asian-African arid regions.
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