H-SAF PRECIPITATION PRODUCTS

The Royal Meteorological Institute of Belgium (RMI) contributes to the Satellite Application Facility on Support to Operational Hydrology and Water Management (H-SAF) in several product validation activities. Precipitation products validation comprises first a program common to a number of countries that represent the variety of European climates; this program consists in computing scores, contingency tables and probability distributions for the various products and based on the comparison with rain gauge data and weather radar data. Second, specific activities include the analysis of case studies and an investigation on the use of the Scale Recursive Estimation (SRE) methodology to merge in an efficient and optimal way data at different spatial resolution. Finally, in the so-called hydrological validation, cumulated precipitation products are evaluated through their use as forcing data of a water balance model. This paper focuses on the methodology used for the instantaneous precipitation products derived from microwave cross-track scanners (PR-OBS-2) and gives an overview of the other topics