RT Journal Article
T1 Validation of a new SAFRAN-based gridded precipitation product for Spain and comparisons to Spain02 and ERA-Interim
A1 Quintana Seguí, Pere
A1 Turco, Marco
A1 Herrera, Sixto
A1 Míguez Macho, Gonzalo
AB Offline land surface model (LSM) simulations areuseful for studying the continental hydrological cycle. Becauseof the nonlinearities in the models, the results are verysensitive to the quality of the meteorological forcing; thus,high-quality gridded datasets of screen-level meteorologicalvariables are needed. Precipitation datasets are particularlydifficult to produce due to the inherent spatial and temporalheterogeneity of that variable. They do, however, have alarge impact on the simulations, and it is thus necessary tocarefully evaluate their quality in great detail.This paper reports the quality of two high-resolution precipitationdatasets for Spain at the daily time scale: thenew SAFRAN-based dataset and Spain02. SAFRAN is ameteorological analysis system that was designed to forceLSMs and has recently been extended to the entirety ofSpain for a long period of time (1979/1980–2013/2014).Spain02 is a daily precipitation dataset for Spain and wascreated mainly to validate regional climate models. In addition,ERA-Interim is included in the comparison to showthe differences between local high-resolution and global lowresolutionproducts. The study compares the different precipitationanalyses with rain gauge data and assesses their temporaland spatial similarities to the observations.The validation of SAFRAN with independent data showsthat this is a robust product. SAFRAN and Spain02 havevery similar scores, although the latter slightly surpasses theformer. The scores are robust with altitude and throughoutthe year, save perhaps in summer when a diminished skill isobserved. As expected, SAFRAN and Spain02 perform betterthan ERA-Interim, which has difficulty capturing the effectsof the relief on precipitation due to its low resolution.However, ERA-Interim reproduces spells remarkably well incontrast to the low skill shown by the high-resolution products.The high-resolution gridded products overestimate thenumber of precipitation days, which is a problem that affectsSAFRAN more than Spain02 and is likely caused bythe interpolation method. Both SAFRAN and Spain02 underestimatehigh precipitation events, but SAFRAN does somore than Spain02. The overestimation of low precipitationevents and the underestimation of intense episodes will probablyhave hydrological consequences once the data are usedto force a land surface or hydrological model.
PB Copernicus Publications
SN 1027-5606
YR 2017
FD 2017
LK http://hdl.handle.net/10347/22792
UL http://hdl.handle.net/10347/22792
LA eng
NO Quintana-Seguí, P., Turco, M., Herrera, S., and Miguez-Macho, G.: Validation of a new SAFRAN-based gridded precipitation product for Spain and comparisons to Spain02 and ERA-Interim, Hydrol. Earth Syst. Sci., 21, 2187–2201, https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-21-2187-2017, 2017
NO This is a contribution to the FP7 eartH2Observe project(http://www.earth2observer.eu), which received funding from theEuropean Union’s Seventh Programme for research, technologicaldevelopment and demonstration under grant agreement no. 603608.This work has been funded by the Spanish Economy and CompetitivenessMinistry and the European Regional Development Fundthrough grant CGL2013-47261-R. This work has been supportedby the Metropolitan Area of Barcelona Project (no. 308321;flood evolution in the metropolitan area of Barcelona from aholistic perspective: past, present and future) and the SpanishProject HOPE (CGL2014-52571-R) supported by the Ministryof Economy and Competitiveness. This work is a contribution tothe HyMeX program (Hydrological cycle in the MediterraneanEXperiment; http://www.hymex.org)
DS Minerva
RD 28 abr 2026