SM2RAIN-CCI (1 Jan 1998 – 31 December 2015) global daily rainfall dataset

A NEW GLOBAL SCALE RAINFALL PRODUCT obtained from satellite soil moisture data through the SM2RAIN algorithm (Brocca et al., 2014), at 0.25 degree/daily spatial-temporal resolution, has been delivered. The SM2RAIN method was applied to the ESA CCI soil moisture Active and Passive products (Liu et al., 2011, 2012; Wagner et al., 2012) for the period from January 1998 to December 2015 (18 years).

The CCI-derived rainfall datasets (in mm/day) is gridded over a 0.25-degree grid on a global scale. The number of dates is 6574 (1998/01/01 – 2015/12/31). The product represents the cumulated rainfall between the 00:00 and the 23:59 UTC of the indicated day.

The rainfall dataset is provided in netCDF format. A total of 18 netCDF files, one per year, are provided.

The rainfall dataset is obtained by applying the SM2RAIN algorithm to the ESA CCI soil moisture Active and Passive products at version 03.1 separately. Then, an integration procedure based on a weighted average is applied in order to obtain the rainfall estimate. The algorithm has been calibrated during three different periods (1998-2001, 2002-2006 and 2007-2013) against the Global Precipitation Climatology Centre Full-Data daily dataset (GPCC-FDD, Schamm et al., 2015). The quality flag provided within the raw soil moisture observations has been used to mask out low quality data, as well as the areas characterized by high topographic complexity, high frozen soil and snow probability and presence of tropical forests.

References

Brocca, L., Ciabatta, L., Massari, C., Moramarco, T., Hahn, S., Hasenauer, S., Kidd, R., Dorigo, W., Wagner, W., Levizzani, V. (2014). Soil as a natural rain gauge: estimating global rainfall from satellite soil moisture data. Journal of Geophysical Research, 119(9), 5128-5141, doi:10.1002/2014JD021489.

Liu, Y. Y., Parinussa, R. M., Dorigo, W. A., De Jeu, R. A. M., Wagner, W., van Dijk, A. I. J. M., McCabe, M. F., Evans, J. P. (2011). Developing an improved soil moisture dataset by blending passive and active microwave satellite-based retrievals. Hydrology and Earth System Sciences, 15, 425-436, doi:10.5194/hess-15-425-2011.

Liu, Y.Y., Dorigo, W.A., Parinussa, R.M., de Jeu, R.A.M., Wagner, W., McCabe, M.F., Evans, J.P., van Dijk, A.I.J.M. (2012). Trend-preserving blending of passive and active microwave soil moisture retrievals, Remote Sensing of Environment, 123, 280-297, doi: 10.1016/j.rse.2012.03.014.

Schamm, K., Ziese, M., Raykova, K., Becker, A., Finger, P., Meyer-Christoffer, A., Schneider, U. (2015). GPCC Full Data Daily Version 1.0 at 1.0°: Daily Land-Surface Precipitation from Rain-Gauges built on GTS-based and Historic Data. DOI: 10.5676/DWD_GPCC/FD_D_V1_100.

Wagner, W., Dorigo, W., de Jeu, R., Fernandez, D., Benveniste, J., Haas, E., Ertl, M. (2012). Fusion of active and passive microwave observations to create an Essential Climate Variable data record on soil moisture, ISPRS Annals of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences (ISPRS Annals), Volume I-7, XXII ISPRS Congress, Melbourne, Australia, 25 August-1 September 2012, 315-321.