Comparison and Validation of Several Open Access Remotely Sensed Rainfall Products for the Nile Basin

Researches about the water cycle are done very often and are very effective to improve the efficiency of the water usage for a basin. Especially in water scarce areas, this type of research are wanted. Water scarcity occurs when water supply cannot meet the water demand. More than half of the world will experience physical or economic water problems in 2025. More insight in rainfall statistics can reduce the water scarcity problems due to better planning of storage, retention, allocation, distribution and consumptive use. A tool to quantify the efficiency is with the Water Accounting framework. But this framework requires accurate rainfall data. Because rainfall ground measurements are not available all over the world one has to look for other data sources for a large part of the world. For those areas, remote sensing rainfall products can offer good rainfall estimations for those basins. But with several ground measurements on the market the question is which of the open access remote sensed rainfall products is the most accurate? In this research 13 remote sensed rainfall product are validated and compared for the Nile Basin for a yearly and a monthly temporal resolution between 2000 and 2010. Also a 14th product is made with the use of the relative errors estimated with the triple collocation method. The results showed that the CHIRPS v1.8 product has the best correlation and root mean squared error, and the TRMM 3B43 product showed the best bias.

Subject

Remote Sensing
Water Accounting
Triple Collocation
TRMM
Nile Basin

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master thesis

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