Evaluation of IMERG and MSG-CPP precipitation estimates over Europe using EURADCLIM: a gauge-adjusted European composite radar dataset

Abstract

A new pan-European climatological dataset was recently released that has a much higher spatiotemporal resolution than existing pan-European interpolated rain gauge datasets. This radar dataset of hourly precipitation accumulations, EURADCLIM (Overeem et al. 2023), covers most of continental Europe with a resolution of 2 km × 2 km, and is adjusted employing data from potentially thousands of government rain gauges. This study aims to use this dataset to evaluate two important satellite-derived precipitation products over the period 2013 to 2019 at a much higher spatiotemporal resolution than was previously possible at the European scale: the IMERG late run and the Meteosat Second Generation (MSG) Cloud Physical Properties product from the SEVIRI instrument. The latter is only available during daytime, so the analyses are restricted to daytime conditions. A direct grid cell comparison of hourly precipitation reveals an apparently low coefficient of correlation. However, looking into slightly more detail at statistics pertaining to longer time scales or specific areas, the datasets show good correspondence. All datasets are shown to have their specific biases, that can be transient or more systematic, depending on the timing or location. The MSG precipitation seems to have an overall positive bias and the IMERG dataset suffers from some transient overestimation of certain events.