Radar-based quantitative precipitation estimation for the identification of debris flow occurrence over earthquake-affected regions in Sichuan, China

Abstract. Both Ms 8.0 Wenchuan earthquake on 12 May 2008 and Ms 7.0 Lushan earthquake on 20 April 2013 occurred in the province of Sichuan, China. In the earthquake-affected mountainous area, a large amount of loose material caused a high occurrence of debris flow during the rainy season. In order to evaluate the rainfall intensity–duration (I–D) threshold of the debris flow in the earthquake-affected area, and to fill up the observational gaps caused by the relatively scarce and low-altitude deployment of rain gauges in this area, raw data from two S-band China New Generation Doppler Weather Radar (CINRAD) were captured for six rainfall events that triggered 519 debris flows between 2012 and 2014. Due to the challenges of radar quantitative precipitation estimation (QPE) over mountainous areas, a series of improvement measures are considered: a hybrid scan mode, a vertical reflectivity profile (VPR) correction, a mosaic of reflectivity, a merged rainfall–reflectivity (R − Z) relationship for convective and stratiform rainfall, and rainfall bias adjustment with Kalman filter (KF). For validating rainfall accumulation over complex terrains, the study areas are divided into two kinds of regions by the height threshold of 1.5 km from the ground. Three kinds of radar rainfall estimates are compared with rain gauge measurements. It is observed that the normalized mean bias (NMB) is decreased by 39 % and the fitted linear ratio between radar and rain gauge observation reaches at 0.98. Furthermore, the radar-based I–D threshold derived by the frequentist method is I = 10.1D−0.52 and is underestimated by uncorrected raw radar data. In order to verify the impacts on observations due to spatial variation, I–D thresholds are identified from the nearest rain gauge observations and radar observations at the rain gauge locations. It is found that both kinds of observations have similar I–D thresholds and likewise underestimate I–D thresholds due to undershooting at the core of convective rainfall. It is indicated that improvement of spatial resolution and measuring accuracy of radar observation will lead to the improvement of identifying debris flow occurrence, especially for events triggered by the strong small-scale rainfall process in the study area.