From Thierry Pellarin IGE

Surface soil moisture intrinsically contains information on previous rain event. Different research teams (W. Crow (USDA, US), L. Brocca (IRPI, Italy), T. Pellarin (IGE, France), N. Wanders (Utrecht, NL)) investigated the way to use satellite soil moisture measurements to derive a precipitation product. At IGE (Grenoble Alpes University), a methodology based on the assimilation of SMOS measurement in a simple soil moisture – precipitation model was developed: the PrISM methodology (Precipitation Inferred from Soil Moisture).

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Figure: Evaluation of PrISM precipitation products over 20 raingauge stations in Burkina Faso. PrISM is applied to correct for CMORPH, PERSIANN and TRMM-RT products using SMOS-L3SM.

The illustration gives an overview of the performance of three real-time satellite precipitation products (CMORPH, PERSIANN and TRMM-RT) versus SMOS-PrISM products over 20 raingauge stations in Burkina Faso (2012) in term of correlation, RMSE and bias (red boxes). The blue boxes (PrIMS products) indicate the improvement of the performances of the three real-time satellite precipitation products due to SMOS soil moisture information.

PrISM precipitation products (0.25°, 3 hours) are available on CATDS from 2010 to 2017, for Africa and Australia. PrISM was funded by CNES (TOSCA) and ESA (SMOS+RAINFALL ESA/AO/1-7875/14/I-NC).

Data is available on CATDS and more specifically here and more details on the product are given here

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