Offline land surface model (LSM) simulations are useful for studying the continental hydrological cycle. Because of the nonlinearities in the models, the results are very sensitive to the quality of the meteorological forcing; thus, high-quality gridded datasets of screen-level meteorological variables are needed. Precipitation datasets are particularly difficult to produce due to the inherent spatial and temporal heterogeneity of that variable. They do, however, have a large impact on the simulations, and it is thus necessary to carefully evaluate their quality in great detail.
This paper reports the quality of two high-resolution precipitation datasets for Spain at the daily time scale: the new SAFRAN-based dataset and Spain02. SAFRAN is a meteorological analysis system that was designed to force LSMs and has recently been extended to the entirety of Spain for a long period of time (1979/1980–2013/2014). Spain02 is a daily precipitation dataset for Spain and was created mainly to validate regional climate models. In addition, ERA-Interim is included in the comparison to show the differences between local high-resolution and global low-resolution products. The study compares the different precipitation analyses with rain gauge data and assesses their temporal and spatial similarities to the observations.
Observatori de l'Ebre (OE), Universitat Ramon Llull - CSIC, Horta Alta 38, Roquetes, Spain; Department of Applied Physics, University of Barcelona (UB), Av. Diagonal 647, Barcelona, Spain; Meteorology Group, Department of Applied Mathematics and Computer Science, Universidad de Cantabria, Avenida de los Castros s/n, Santander, Spain; Grupo de Física No Lineal, Universidade de Santiago Compostela, Calle Xosé María Suárez, Núñez s/n, Santiago de Compostela, Spain
Recommended Citation:
Quintana-Seguí P,, Turco M,, Herrera S,et al. Validation of a new SAFRAN-based gridded precipitation product for Spain and comparisons to Spain02 and ERA-Interim[J]. Hydrology and Earth System Sciences,2017-01-01,21(4)