Across the Western Himalaya

Extreme, flood-producing precipitation events in mountains threaten human life and local and national economies. In the Himalayas, scarce meteorological data historically limited understanding of the underlying processes driving extreme events. However, the capacity to observe, measure and quantify precipitation on regional scales has increased tremendously over the last three decades with the increasing prevalence of remotely-sensed data. While remotely-sensed precipitation can add essential information for understanding local hydrology, the spatial and temporal scales of the observations may result in biases based on the types of events that can be captured by the data. We analyze one of the recent remotely-sensed precipitation datasets, collected by the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM), to better understand the spatial and temporal context of storm processes that generate flood disasters in high mountain environments. The objectives of this study are to 1) analyze the spatial distribution of extreme rainfall and convection across the mountain systems of the western Himalayan region, 2) investigate the deviations between remotely-sensed and ground-based precipitation observations across the orography, and 3) examine the sub-grid heterogeneity o