Bias correction of the hourly satellite precipitation product using machine learning methods enhanced with high-resolution WRF meteorological simulations

Accurate precipitation data are crucial in atmospheric and hydrological studies, especially for water resource management and disaster early warning. Satellite precipitation product (SPP) with high spatiotemporal resolution has been regarded as a valuable alternative precipitation source to ground observations. However, the hourly SPP generally performs poorly compared to daily SPP, thereby bias correction is urgently required. This study investigates the viability of utilizing machine learning methods to correct the bias of the hourly Integrated Multi-satellitE Retrievals for Global Precipitation Measurement-Early (IMERG-E) product. Meanwhile, the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model is utilized to generate high-resolution fields of four hourly meteorological variables, namely, temperature at 2 m (TEMP2), specific humidity at 2 m (Q2), wind direction at 10 m (WDIR10), and wind speed at 10 m (WSPD10), which further serve as covariates in machine learning models to enhance the correction process. Four machine learning models were developed, i.e., Random Forest (RF) and Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory Networks (Bi-LSTM) without WRF-simulated covariates, and RF-WRF and Bi-LSTM-WRF with meteorological covariates. The results demonstrated that incorporating WRF-simulated meteorological covariates improved model performance. Specifically, correlation coefficient (CC) values increased from 0.47 (RF) to 0.51 (RF-WRF) and rose from 0.55 (Bi-LSTM) to 0.60 (Bi-LSTM-WRF), along with reduced root mean square error (RMSE) and increased critical success index (CSI) values. Furthermore, two Bi-LSTM models consistently outperformed two RF models. Overall, the Bi-LSTM-WRF model emerged as the most effective correction method, which increased CC from 0.43 (IMERG-E) to 0.60, reduced RMSE from 1.91 mm to 1.08 mm, and enhanced CSI from 0.34 to 0.41. This study underscores the potential of integrating high-resolution WRF meteorological outputs into machine learning frameworks for correcting hourly SPPs, contributing significantly to the advancement of precipitation estimation in meteorological and hydrological applications. • Use machine-learning models to correct the bias of Hourly IMERG-E in a hilly region. • Integration of WRF outputs into machine learning enhances bias-correction performance. • Bi-LSTM mostly outperforms Random Forest in correcting the bias of hourly IMERG-E. • The best performed Bi-LSTM-WRF model increases CC by 40% while reducing RMSE by 43%.