Evaluation and error decomposition of IMERG product based on multiple satellite sensors

Abstract

The Integrated Multisatellite Retrievals for GPM (IMERG) is designed to derive precipitation by merging data from all the passive microwave (PMW) and infrared (IR) sensors. While the input source errors originating from the PMW and IR sensors are important, their structure, characteristics, and algorithm improvement remain unclear. Our study utilized a four-component error decomposition (4CED) method and a systematic and random error decomposition method to evaluate the detectability of IMERG dataset and identify the precipitation errors based on the multi-sensors. The 30 min data from 30 precipitation stations in the Tunxi Watershed were used to evaluate the IMERG data from 2018 to 2020. The input source includes five types of PMW sensors and IR instruments. The results show that the sample ratio for IR (Morph, IR + Morph, and IR only) is much higher than that for PMW (AMSR2, SSMIS, GMI, MHS, and ATMS), with a ratio of 72.8% for IR sources and a ratio of 27.2% for PMW sources. The high false ratio of the IR sensor leads to poor detectability performance of the false alarm ratio (FAR, 0.5854), critical success index (CSI, 0.3014), and Brier score (BS, 0.1126). As for the 4CED, Morph and Morph + IR have a large magnitude of high total bias (TB), hit overestimate bias (HOB), hit underestimate bias (HUB), false bias (FB), and miss bias (MB), which is related to the prediction ability and sample size. In addition, systematic error is the prominent component for AMSR2, SSMIS, GMI, and Morph + IR, indicating some inherent error (retrieval algorithm) that needs to be removed. These findings can support improving the retrieval algorithm and reducing errors in the IMERG dataset.