Verification of APHRODITE Precipitation Data Set in Bangladesh

Abstract

We investigated the preformance of Asian Precipitation-Highly-Resolved Observational Data Integration Towards Evaluation (APHRODITE) of water resources precipitation products in Bangladesh taking rain gauge data as reference for a 3-year period (2003-2005). Various statistical and categorical indices such as coefficient of correlation (CC), bias, relative bias (RB), mean absolute error (MAE), root mean square error (RMSE), probability of detection (POD), and false alarm ratio (FAR), were applied to measure the performance of the product. With CC value of 0.85, bias of 0.91, RB of -9.5%, MAE of 7.7 mm, and RMSE of 15.2 mm the product tended to underestimate rainfall values during the study period. Although, the POD score of 1.00 demonstrated very good skill in detecting the occurrence of rainfall events, FAR value of 0.25 indicated a considerable amount of false alarms. Moreover, as the precipitation threshold increased, the underestimation became more prominent over the study region. Analysis on the basis of location of the rain gauges also showed that APHRODITE consistently underestimated rainfall values with the increase of extreme rainfall thresholds.

Journal of Engineering Science 12(1), 2021, 51-56