Quantifying Precipitation Uncertainty for Land Data Assimilation Applications

Abstract

Ensemble-based data assimilation techniques are often applied to land surface models in order to estimate components of terrestrial water and energy balance. Precipitation forcing uncertainty is the principal source of spread among the ensembles that is required for utilizing information in observations to correct model priors. Precipitation fields may have both position and magnitude errors. However, current uncertainty characterizations of precipitation forcing in land data assimilation systems often do no more than applying multiplicative errors to precipitation fields. In this paper, an ensemble-based Bayesian method for characterization of uncertainties associated with precipitation retrievals from spaceborne instruments is introduced. This method is used to produce stochastic replicates of precipitation fields that are conditioned on precipitation observations. Unlike previous studies, the error likelihood is derived using an archive of historical measurements. The ensemble replicates are generated using a stochastic method, and they are intermittent in space and time. The replicates are first projected in a low-dimension subspace using a problem-specific set of attributes. The attributes are derived using a dimensionality reduction scheme that takes advantage of singular value decomposition. A nonparametric importance sampling technique is formulated in terms of the attribute vectors to solve the Bayesian sampling problem. Examples are presented using retrievals from operational passive microwave instruments, and performance of the method is assessed using ground validation measurements from a surface weather radar network. Results indicate that this ensemble characterization approach provides a useful description of precipitation uncertainties with a posterior ensemble that is narrower in distribution than its prior while containing both precipitation position and magnitude errors.