Abstract
Gridded precipitation datasets have been used as alternatives to rain
gauge observations, but their applicability for a specific region should
be thoroughly evaluated. This paper aims at finding the most appropriate
one for climatological and hydrological applications in Indonesia, by
evaluating the statistics of the performance of eight different datasets
(research products) having horizontal resolutions between 0.1◦ and 0.25◦
and with a time span of data availability from 2003 to 2015. The
datasets are compared against the observed daily rainfall at 133
stations using 13 statistical metrics that can be classified into three
groups with different characteristics of measurements, namely,
distribution, time sequence, and extreme value representations. By
applying Summation of Rank (SR), it is found that MSWEP and TMPA 3B42
are the top two datasets that outperformed based on distribution and
time-sequence performance metric groups. The extreme performances for
all datasets are still good in 75th percentiles, however the performance
decreasing for more than 75th percentiles indicating still poorly
representation of daily extreme rainfall for all gridded datasets.
Results of this study suggest that MSWEP (v2) is presently the best
gridded precipitation datasets available for climatological and
hydrological applications in Indonesia.