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Abstract Precipitation is arguably the most important meteorological forcing variable in land surface modeling. Many types of precipitation datasets exist (with various pros and cons) and include those from atmospheric data assimilation systems, satellites, rain gauges, ground radar, and merged products. These datasets are being evaluated in order to choose the most suitable precipitation forcing for real-time and retrospective simulations of the Global Land Data Assimilation System (GLDAS). This paper first presents results of a comparison for the period from March 2002 to February 2003. Later, GLDAS simulations 14 months in duration are analyzed to diagnose impacts on GLDAS land surface states when using the Mosaic land surface model (LSM). A comparison of seasonal total precipitation for the continental United States (CONUS) illustrates that the Climate Prediction Center (CPC) Merged Analysis of Precipitation (CMAP) has the closest agreement with a CPC rain gauge dataset for all seasons except winter. The European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) model performs the best of the modeling systems. The satellite-only products the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) Real-time Multi-satellite Precipitation Analysis and the Precipitation Estimation from Remotely Sensed Information using Artificial Neural Networks (PERSIANN) suffer from a few deficiencies—most notably an overestimation of summertime precipitation in the central United States (200–400 mm). CMAP is the most closely correlated with daily rain gauge data for the spring, fall, and winter seasons, while the satellite-only estimates perform best in summer. GLDAS land surface states are sensitive to different precipitation forcing where percent differences in volumetric soil water content (SWC) between simulations ranged from −75% to +100%. The percent differences in SWC are generally 25%–75% less than the percent precipitation differences, indicating that GLDAS and specifically the Mosaic LSM act to generally “damp” precipitation differences. Areas where the percent changes are equivalent to the percent precipitation changes, however, are evident. Soil temperature spread between GLDAS runs was considerable and ranged up to ±3.0 K with the largest impact in the western United States.
Gottschalck et al. (Sat,) studied this question.