Satellite precipitation products are becoming increasingly useful to complement rain gauge networks in regions where these are too sparse to capture spatial precipitation patterns, such as in the Tropical Andes. The Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) Precipitation Radar (TPR) was active for 17 years (1998–2014) and has generated one of the longest single-sensor, high-resolution, and high accuracy rainfall records. In this study, high-resolution (5 km) gridded mean monthly climatological precipitation is derived from the raw orbital TPR data (TRMM 2A25) and merged with 723 rain gauges using multiple satellite-gauge (S-G) merging approaches. The resulting precipitation products are evaluated by cross validation and catchment water balances (runoff ratios) for 50 catchments across the Tropical Andes. Results show that the TPR captures major synoptic and seasonal precipitation patt...

An extensive evaluation of nine global-scale high-resolution satellite-based rainfall (SBR) products is performed using a minimum of 6 years (within the period of 2000-13) of reference rainfall data derived from rain gauge networks in nine mountainous regions across the globe. The SBR products are compared to a recently released global reanalysis dataset from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF). The study areas include the eastern Italian Alps, the Swiss Alps, the western Black Sea of Turkey, the French Cévennes, the Peruvian Andes, the Colombian Andes, the Himalayas over Nepal, the Blue Nile in East Africa, Taiwan, and the U.S. Rocky Mountains. Evaluation is performed at annual, monthly, and daily time scales and 0.25° spatial resolution. The SBR datasets are based on the following retrieval algorithms: Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission Multisatellite Prec...