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Radar-based Precipitation Climatology in Germany – Developments, Uncertainties and Potentials
Version 1
: Received: 3 February 2020 / Approved: 4 February 2020 / Online: 4 February 2020 (10:42:56 CET)
A peer-reviewed article of this Preprint also exists.
Kreklow, J.; Tetzlaff, B.; Burkhard, B.; Kuhnt, G. Radar-Based Precipitation Climatology in Germany—Developments, Uncertainties and Potentials. Atmosphere 2020, 11, 217. Kreklow, J.; Tetzlaff, B.; Burkhard, B.; Kuhnt, G. Radar-Based Precipitation Climatology in Germany—Developments, Uncertainties and Potentials. Atmosphere 2020, 11, 217.
Abstract
Precipitation is a crucial driver for many environmental processes and weather radars are capable of providing precipitation information with high spatial and temporal resolution. However, radar-based quantitative precipitation estimates (QPE) are also subject to various potential uncertainties. This study explores the development, uncertainties and potentials of the hourly operational German radar-based and gauge-adjusted QPE called RADOLAN and its reanalysed radar climatology dataset named RADKLIM in comparison to ground-truth rain gauge data. The precipitation datasets are statistically analysed across various time scales ranging from annual and seasonal aggregations to hourly rainfall intensities in regard to their capability to map long-term precipitation distribution, to detect low intensity rainfall and to capture heavy rainfall. Moreover, the impacts of season, orography and distance from the radar on long-term precipitation sums are examined in order to evaluate dataset performance and to describe inherent biases. Results revealed that both radar products tend to underestimate total precipitation sums and particularly high intensity rainfall. But our analyses also showed significant improvements throughout the RADOLAN time series as well as major advances through the climatologic reanalysis regarding the correction of typical radar artefacts, orographic and winter precipitation as well as range-dependent attenuation.
Keywords
Weather radar; rain gauge; rainfall; QPE; RADOLAN; RADKLIM; GIS; radar climatology; uncertainties
Subject
Environmental and Earth Sciences, Atmospheric Science and Meteorology
Copyright: This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
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