Spatio-temporal evaluation of global gridded precipitation datasets across Iran

ABSTRACT

In this work, the accuracy of four gridded precipitation datasets – Climatic Research Unit (CRU), Global Precipitation Climatology Centre (GPCC), PERSIANN-Climate Data Record (PCDR) and University of Delaware (UDEL) – is evaluated across Iran to find an alternative source of precipitation data. Monthly, seasonal and annual precipitation data from 85 synoptic stations for the period 1984–2013 were used as the basis for the evaluations. Our results indicate that all datasets underestimate and overestimate precipitation in stations with annual precipitation greater than 600 and less than 100 mm, respectively. However, all datasets correctly recognize regimes of precipitation, but with a bias in amount of precipitation. Our spatio-temporal assessments show that GPCC is the most suitable dataset to be used over Iran. Both UDEL and CRU can be considered as the second and third most suitable datasets, while PCDR showed the weakest performance among the studied datasets.