Assessment of CHIRPS and PERSIANN-CDR products for meteorological drought monitoring and future trends in East Africa

Abstract The satellite precipitation products provide a reliable alternative data source for real-time drought monitoring in developing countries. Therefore, it is important to quantify the excellent satellite precipitation products for drought estimation. This study evaluated two long-term satellite precipitation products and their capability for monitoring meteorological drought events over East Africa. The Climate Hazard Group Infra-Red Precipitation with Station (CHIRPS) and the Precipitation Estimation from Remotely Sensed Information using Artificial Neural Network-Climate Data Record (PERSIANN-CDR) products have been selected from 1985 to 2019 and compared these datasets from observation data retrieved from Climate Research Unit over the studied region. The four statistical metrics were used to evaluate the performance of these satellite precipitation products. The Standardized Precipitation Index was estimated from these two satellite precipitation datasets and compared with observation data to identify the drought detection capacity of these products over East Africa. The findings of these studies revealed that the CHIRPS datasets showed excellent performance (CC = 0.95) with observation and significantly captured the drought events over the studied region. The PERSIANN-CDR products show overestimation/ underestimation of drought events (RMSE = 0.65) in both spatial and temporal scales over East Africa during the studied period. In addition, this study estimates the Hurst Exponent ( H ) to predict the magnitude of drought events capacity of these two satellite precipitation data. The H -exponent results show that the CHIRPS data performed well in predicting drought events in the future, and these drought events could decrease in most of the East Africa region in the future.