Enhancing Rainfall Estimates in East Africa by Integrating TAHMO Ground Data and Satellite Rainfall Products

Abstract East Africa relies heavily on satellite-based rainfall estimates due to the lack of in situ data. However, satellite rainfall products often perform poorly in this region. In this study, data from the Trans-African Hydrometeorological Observatory (TAHMO) were used to build a regional rainfall product in East Africa based on the Soil Moisture to Rain (SM2Rain) algorithm. Subsequently, this regional product was merged with a reanalysis product (ERA5) and two microwave (MW)/infrared (IR)-based rainfall products (IMERG and CHIRPS) based on the Statistical Uncertainty Analysis-Based Precipitation Merging (SUPER) framework. Within this framework, merging weights are derived from the error variances of the rainfall products determined from quadruple collocation on a pixel-to-pixel basis. The merged and individual products are evaluated using data from individual TAHMO stations. We tested SUPER with various interproduct dependency assumptions and found that, in the best-performing configuration, IMERG contributed the most to the merged product, followed by CHIRPS, ERA5, and SM2Rain. SM2Rain showed performance comparable to other rainfall products but is more useful for detecting the offset of the rainy season in drier climates and less reliable under wet conditions. The findings indicated that the merged product outperforms the individual products in most performance metrics. Additionally, we demonstrated the importance of comparing satellite and ground-measured precipitation time series, alongside evaluating performance metrics. The ultimate goal of this study is to develop a workflow to enhance the accuracy of rainfall measurements in East Africa by leveraging information from TAHMO data and different existing products, contributing to the improvement of satellite-based rainfall estimates in East Africa.