Artifacts in Stage IV NWS Real-Time Multisensor Precipitation Estimates and Impacts on Identification of Maximum Series
Publication: Journal of Hydrologic Engineering
Volume 22, Issue 5
Abstract
In recent years, there has been a growing interest by different user communities to use radar-based rainfall products for identifying and quantifying heavy precipitation and other related information. A potentially viable product for such analyses is the National Weather Service (NWS) Stage IV Quantitative Precipitation Estimate (QPE), which covers the entire conterminous United States and is available at 1, 6, and 24 h temporal resolutions. The current article focuses on data artifacts in the Stage IV product over its full record period (2002–2013) and assesses their impacts on the analysis and derivation of heavy rainfall statistics. Examining annual maximum series extracted from the Stage IV 1-h accumulation product revealed the presence of numerous artifacts that were mostly linked to erroneous rain gauge reports and which can be mistaken as rainfall maxima. Artifacts were found over many parts of the United States, including the west, south, southeast, and northeast. Other erroneous features that affect the spatial delineation of heavy precipitation include nonrainy lines and polygons in many regions over the product domain. The current analysis demonstrated that these artifacts had negative impacts on the estimation of parameters and quantiles of commonly used extreme value probability distributions. Additional exploratory analyses indicate that Stage IV 6-h and 24-h accumulations, as well as the longer-latency QPE archive from the regional River Forecasting Centers (RFCs), are mostly free from the artifacts shown in the Stage IV 1-h product. These comparative analyses revealed that the Stage IV product, at least over some of the RFC domains, misses on the benefits of human quality control that is introduced at a later stage at the RFCs, and suggested that caution be exercised in applying Stage IV as the basis for analysis of heavy precipitation.
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Acknowledgments
This study was funded in part by the Louisiana Board of Regents through the following grant: Research and Education Cyberinfrastructure Investments to Develop the Coastal Hazards Collaboratory in the Northern Gulf Coast. Stage IV QPE data were provided by NCAR/EOL under sponsorship of the National Science Foundation (http://data.eol.ucar.edu/). The LMRFC QPE products used in this study were provided by the Lower Mississippi River Forecast Center. The authors acknowledge the valuable inputs and comments provided by David Kitzmiller (Office of Hydrologic Development, NOAA/NWS) regarding the MPE operational setup and quality procedure at different RFCs. The authors thank Yin Ling (Environmental Modeling Center/NCEP/NWS/NOAA) for the valuable input on the NCEP Stage IV analysis and product. The authors would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and suggestions to improve the quality of the paper.
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Journal of Hydrologic Engineering
Volume 22 • Issue 5 • May 2017
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© 2015 American Society of Civil Engineers.
History
Received: Dec 28, 2014
Accepted: Jul 15, 2015
Published online: Dec 11, 2015
Discussion open until: May 11, 2016
Published in print: May 1, 2017
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