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| Titel |
The Global Precipitation Climatology Centre serving the hydro-climatology community |
| VerfasserIn |
Andreas Becker, Udo Schneider, Anja Meyer-Christoffer, Markus Ziese, Peter Finger, Bruno Rudolf |
| Konferenz |
EGU General Assembly 2011
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| Medientyp |
Artikel
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| Sprache |
Englisch
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| Digitales Dokument |
PDF |
| Erschienen |
In: GRA - Volume 13 (2011) |
| Datensatznummer |
250048257
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| Zusammenfassung |
| Precipitation is meanwhile a top listed parameter on the WMO GCOS list of 44 essential
climate variables (ECV). This is easily justified by its crucial role to sustain any
form of life on earth as major source of fresh water, its major impact on weather,
climate, climate change and related issues of society’s adaption to the latter. Finally its
occurrence is highly variable in space and time thus bearing the potential to trigger
major flood and drought related disasters. It therefore didn’t need the ECV badge in
year 1989 to assemble enough arguments in support of the implementation of a
Global Precipitation Climatology Centre at the Deutscher Wetterdienst with the
ambition to provide for the most comprehensive and reliable global precipitation
data set world wide. The effort was inaugurated as part of the Global Precipitation
Climatology Project of the WMO World Climate Research Program (WCRP). Five
prerequisites to reach and sustain the aspired service level have remained valid as
follows:
An utmost care taken for the integrity and quality of the data
State-of-the-art methods applied for the data interpolation on regular grids
Derived products that are tailored to the manifold needs of the broad user
community
An open ear to the community with regard to product and method enhancements
An efficient, successful and sustained data acquisition process supported by
WMO
One of the most interesting GPCC products is surely the so-called Monitoring Product
that is realized roughly two months after the fact based on the data gathered while listening to
the GTS to fetch the SYNOP and CLIMAT messages. This product is highly welcome to the
satellite based remote sensing community to provide for a gridded data set of highly reliable
in-situ precipitation measurements to supplement their products and to calibrate
their indirect precipitation measurements (Gruber and Levizzani, 2008, Chapter
2.2).
The presentation will present some example application to illustrate the potential of the
GPCC products. One example will also provide a first assessment of the strong 2010 La Nina
season that has apparently caused severe weather patterns world wide, including the flood
disasters in Pakistan and Wuhan, China. In doing so we will also demonstrate the
capability of the GPCC visualizer, a user friendly web interface to the GPCC data
base1,
for its potential to support such kind of global hydro-climatology assessments.
References
Gruber, A. and V. Levizzani, 2008: Assessment of Global Precipitation, A Project of the
Global Energy and Water Cycle Experiment (GEWEX) Radiation Panel GEWEX, World
Climate Research Program, WMO, WCRP Report, May 2008, WCRP-128, WMO/TDNo.
1430;
http://www.wmo.int/pages/prog/wcrp/documents/AssessmentGlobalPrecipitationReport.pdf |
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