Performance of the State-Of-The-Art Gridded Precipitation Products over Mountainous Terrain: A Regional Study over Austria

During the last decade, satellite-based precipitation products have been believed to be a potential source for forcing inputs in hydro-meteorological and agricultural models, which are essential especially over the mountains area or in basins where ground gauges are generally sparse or nonexistent. This study comprehensively evaluates several newly released precipitation products, i.e., MSWEP-V2.2, IMERG-V05B, IMERG-V06A, IMERG-V05-RT, ERA5, and SM2RAIN-ASCAT, at daily and monthly time-scales over Austria. We show that all the examined products are able to reproduce the spatial precipitation distribution over the country. MSWEP, followed by IMERG-V05B and -V06A, show the strongest agreement with in situ observations and perform better than other products with respect to spatial patterns and statistical metrics. Both IMERG and ERA5 products seem to have systematic precipitation overestimation at the monthly time-scale. IMERG-V06A performs slightly better than IMERG-V05B. With respect to heavy precipitation (P > 10 mm/day), MSWEP compare to other products demonstrate advantages in detecting precipitation events with a higher spatial average of probability of detection (POD) and lower false alarm ratio (FAR) scores skill (0.74 and 0.28), while SM2RAIN and ERA5 reveal lower POD (0.35) and higher FAR (0.56) in this precipitation range in comparison with other products. However, the ERA5 and MSWEP indicate robust average POD and FAR values with respect to light/moderate precipitation (10 mm > P ≥ 0.1 mm) with 0.94 and 0.11, respectively. Such robustness of MSWEP may be rooted in applying the daily rain gauges in calibration processes. Moreover, although all products accurately map the spatial precipitation distribution they still have difficulty capturing the effects of topography on precipitation. The overall performance of the precipitation products was lower in the peripheries of the study area where most stations are situated in the mountainous area and was higher over the low altitude regions. However, according to our analysis of the considered products, MSWEP-V2.2, followed by IMERG-V06S and -V05B, are the most suitable for driving hydro-meteorological, agricultural, and other models over mountainous terrain.