Precipitation Uncertainty Across Canadian Watersheds
Precipitation is a vital element of the water and energy cycles and a key forcing variable in driving hydrological models. The availability of accurate precipitation measurements are useful in many applications, such as climate change and/or land use changes, natural hazards, agricultural and environmental studies, and hydrological and water resource planning. A number of global and regional gridded climate products incorporating multiple sources of data have recently been developed with the aim of providing better and more reliable measurements for climate and hydrological studies. However, research into the accuracy of these products for various regions has been limited and in many cases non-existent. This research aims to understand and quantify the spatial and temporal variability of the errors associated with several observational, reanalysis, and satellite-based precipitation products over Canada and develops a systematic analysis framework to assess the characteristics of errors associated with the different products, using the best available precipitation-gauge data as a benchmark. We look at, for example, Multi-satellitE Retrievals for Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) – IMERG, Canadian Precipitation Analysis (CaPA), European Union Water and Global Change (WATCH) Forcing Data, and North American Regional Reanalysis (NARR).


