Preprints
https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-2018-36
https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-2018-36
15 Feb 2018
 | 15 Feb 2018
Status: this discussion paper is a preprint. It has been under review for the journal Hydrology and Earth System Sciences (HESS). The manuscript was not accepted for further review after discussion.

Exploring the Long-Term Reanalysis of Precipitation and the Contribution of Bias Correction to the Reduction of Uncertainty over South Korea: A Composite Gamma-Pareto Distribution Approach to the Bias Correction

Dong-Ik Kim, Hyun-Han Kwon, and Dawei Han

Abstract. The long-term record of precipitation data plays an important role in climate impact studies. The local observation is often considered to be the truth in regional-scale analyses, but the long-term meteorological record for a given catchment is very limited. Recently, ERA-20c, a century-long reanalysis of the data has been published by the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF), which includes daily precipitation over the whole 20th century with high spatial resolution of 0.125° × 0.125°. Preliminary studies have already indicated that the ERA-20c can reproduce the mean reasonably well, but rainfall intensity was underestimated and wet-day frequency was overestimated. The primary focus of this study was to expand our sample size significantly for extreme rainfall analysis. Thus, we first adopted a relatively simple approach to adjust the frequency of wet-days by imposing an optimal lower threshold. We found that the systematic errors are fairly well captured by the conventional quantile mapping method with a gamma distribution, but the extremes in daily precipitation are still somewhat underestimated. In such a context, we introduced a quantile mapping approach based on a composite distribution of a generalized Pareto distribution for the upper tail (e.g. 95th and 99th percentile), and a gamma distribution for the interior part of the distribution. The proposed composite distributions provide a significant reduction of the biases compared with that of the conventional method for the extremes. We suggest a new interpolation method based on the parameter contour map for bias correction in ungauged catchments. The strength of this approach is that one can easily produce the bias-corrected daily precipitation in ungauged or poorly gauged catchments. A comparison of the corrected datasets using contour maps shows that the proposed modelling scheme can reliably reduce the systematic bias at a grid point that is not used in the process of parameter estimation. In particular, the contour map with the 99th percentile shows a more accurate representation of the observed daily rainfall than other combinations. The findings in this study suggest that the proposed approach can provide a useful alternative to readers who consider the bias correction of a regional-scale modelled data with a limited network of rain gauges. Although the study has been carried out in South Korea, the methodology has its potential to be applied in other parts of the world.

Publisher's note: Copernicus Publications remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims made in the text, published maps, institutional affiliations, or any other geographical representation in this preprint. The responsibility to include appropriate place names lies with the authors.
Dong-Ik Kim, Hyun-Han Kwon, and Dawei Han
Dong-Ik Kim, Hyun-Han Kwon, and Dawei Han
Dong-Ik Kim, Hyun-Han Kwon, and Dawei Han

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Short summary
This study introduces a new QM approach based on a composite distribution of a generalized Pareto distribution for the upper tail and a gamma distribution for the interior part of the distribution. The proposed composite distributions provide a significant reduction of the biases compared with that of the conventional method for the extremes. The proposed approach can provide a useful alternative for the bias correction of a regional-scale modeled data with a limited network of rain gauges.