Characteristics of Rainfall Data Sets from Satellites and Exploring Their Role in Studying Rainfall Induced Landslides over India

Abstract

Ongoing scenario of climate change has significant consequences on natural phenomena and people s activity. Experimental and empirical data sets strengthen our knowledge and understanding of regional as well as global climate variability. Rainfall is the most active component coupled with large-scale circulation in weather and climate change research. Reliable estimation of rainfall is very much essential to understand climate variability, development in weather studies, water resource management and hydrological cycle. Ground based rain gauge measures rainfall directly but it has some serious limitations (e.g. incomplete spatial coverage over ocean and sparsely populated regions). With vantage point of space, satellite based observations are providing spatially homogeneous and temporally complete rainfall information. To make best use of relative advantage of both satellite and ground based rainfall measurements products merging algorithm have been designed. As an example, Global Precipitation Climatology Project (GPCP) monthly precipitation from ground-gauge and Precipitation measurements mission observatories TRMM and GPM estimates using low-earth-orbit (LEO) satellite microwave (MW) data and geostationary-satellite Infrared (IR) data providing most popular merged products TMPA and IMERG. These rainfall products at different spatio-temporal scale have shown its utility in wide range of research fields newline