H SAF precipitation products quality assessment and meteorological applications
Jan Kanak talks about comparing H-SAF products against ground truth data and shows some examples over Europe.
Length: 32 minutes
For proper usage of satellite products in meteorological applications it is necessary to take the set of skills which can be divided into technical, logistic and routine work with data, and final application of meteorological knowledge base by means of interpretation tools. Our lesson will provide step by step introduction to validation work with the H SAF precipitation products, introducing BUFR, GRIB and NETCFD decoding, reading and upscaling with the aim to put these various satellite products into common grid suitable for comparison against essential precipitation measurements considered as ground truth. Passing through the validation process and being aware of the accuracy of satellite products, we will show the applicability of these data using selected show cases over Central Europe. Case studies were prepared to demonstrate possibilities but also shortcomings of satellite data, which users need to take into account in practical usage. Because the proper preparation of satellite products is not important only for validation process itself, but also for practical applications, using show cases we will explain how to merge together various sources of precipitation information, e.g. irregular rain gauge point data, regular radar grid data, satellite scanned grids derived from microwave and infrared imagers. We will discuss the special treatment of continuous and discreet parameters like precipitation intensity or accumulated rain versus precipitation phase, quality index and surface type’s parameters to be up-scaled into common grid. Once up scaled data can be merged with the aim to obtain the most probable final values of instantaneous and accumulated precipitation fields. Final message of this training lesson addressed to meteorologists and hydrologists will be targeted to understanding that precipitation must be considered as stochastic parameter describing complex 3D processes in the atmosphere.