Performance of GPCP Products Over Oceans: Evaluation Using Passive
Aquatic Listeners
Abstract
Passive Aquatic Listeners (PALs) have been increasingly deployed to
collect minute-scale surface oceanic rainfall and wind information, with
a sampling area similar to the spaceborne sensor footprints. This
provides an unprecedented opportunity to validate satellite
precipitation products over oceans. This study evaluates the Global
Precipitation Climatology Project (GPCP) daily products, including the
widely-used GPCP v1.3 and the newly released GPCP v3.2, over oceans
using 58 PALs as references. The study shows that the GPCP performance
depends on time scale, region, and rainfall intensity. The two versions
of GPCP perform similarly at multi-year and monthly scales, while GPCP
v3.2 shows substantial improvements in representing rain occurrence and
rain intensity at daily scale. The results also highlight the challenge
of precipitation measurement over certain regions such as the tropical
Northeastern Pacific and extratropical North Pacific, where both
versions of the GPCP products perform similarly but exhibit noticeable
differences compared to PAL observations.