article · International Journal of Remote Sensing
Rainfall in Ethiopia shows high temporal and spatial variability due to complex topography, while ground-based weather stations remain sparse, especially in lowland areas. To identify dependable alternate sources of precipitation data, five satellite products and two reanalysis datasets were evaluated against National Meteorological Agency gauge records at monthly and seasonal scales across three distinct rainfall regimes. The evaluation assessed ARC2, TAMSAT, TRMM 3B43v7, CMORPH, CHIRPSv2, CFSR, and ERA-Interim. CHIRPSv2 emerged as the best performing dataset across all three regimes, followed closely by TRMM 3B43v7 during key rainy seasons. CMORPH, TAMSAT, and ARC2 demonstrated moderate accuracy across the country, whereas the reanalysis products CFSR and ERA-Interim performed poorly in all evaluated zones. The findings provide comparative benchmarks for selecting monthly precipitation estimates when ground measurements are unavailable.
Reliable rainfall information is critical for managing water resources, agriculture, and climate risks, particularly in regions where rain gauges are scarce. Identifying which satellite products reliably capture precipitation patterns helps meteorological organisations, environmental planners, and local decision-makers choose dependable data sources for monitoring seasonal weather and drought conditions across diverse landscapes.
The findings serve practitioners, hydrologists, and meteorological data providers seeking validated datasets for climate monitoring and agricultural forecasting tools in data-sparse regions. Because the study benchmarks existing, publicly accessible data rather than developing a new tool, the insights are directly applicable for immediate integration into regional environmental planning and climate hazard platforms.
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Continuous availability of a variety of satellite and reanalysis rainfall products have triggered the use of such products as an alternate source of rainfall data in sparsely gauge networked areas. However, before utilizing them a detailed validation of these datasets are essential to have some level of guarantee. In many parts of Africa in general and most parts of Ethiopia particularly in the lowland areas, gauge stations are very sparse and unevenly distributed. In addition, due to the nature of complex topography and geographical location, Ethiopian rainfall shows high variability both temporally and spatially. In view of the above, the present study is aimed at statistically evaluating such rainfall products across different rainfall regimes (regions with different rainfall characteristics as defined by National Meteorological Agency (NMA) of Ethiopia). In the current study, five satellite and two reanalysis rainfall products such as African Rainfall Climatology version 2 (ARC2), Tropical Applications of Meteorology using SATellite and ground-based observations (TAMSAT), Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission-3B43 version 7 (TRMM 3B43v7), Climate Prediction Center Morphing Technique (CMORPH), Climate Hazards Group Infrared Precipitation with Stations version 2 (CHIRPSv2), the Climate Forecast System Reanalysis (CFSR) and the European Center for Medium Range Weather Forecast Reanalysis (ERA-Interim) are considered based on their spatial coverage, spatial resolution, temporal resolution, latency period and length of data records. Evaluation is done at monthly and seasonal time scales against the observed gauge rainfall data provided by the National Meteorological Agency of Ethiopia across entire Ethiopia in two different manners, first by considering the entire country as one homogeneous unit and secondly in a distributed manner across the three rainfall regimes of Ethiopia. The obtained results show that: (i) CHIRPSv2 and TRMM 3B43v7 show better performance during June to September (the main rainfall season) and during February to May (the smaller rainfall season) in regimes 1 and 2. (ii) In regime 3 these products show good performance from October to November (smaller rainy season of this regime) and March to May (main rainy season of this regime); (iii).CMORPH, TAMSAT and ARC2 show moderate performance in all three regimes; (iv) CFSR and ERA-Interim exhibit poor performance in all rainfall regimes. Overall, the detailed analysis of statistical evaluation results of the rainfall products at monthly timescale shows that CHIRPSv2 performs comparatively better than the other tested rainfall products across all rainfall regimes. However, the best performance of CHIRPSv2 is obtained in regime 2 followed by regime 1 and regime 3.
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DOI: 10.1080/01431161.2018.1558373
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