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An Improved Spatial Downscaling Procedure

for TRMM 3B43 Precipitation Product Using
Geographically Weighted Regression

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 4592 IEEE JOURNAL OF SELECTED TOPICS IN APPLIED EARTH OBSERVATIONS AND REMOTE SENSING, VOL. 8, NO. 9, SEPTEMBER 2015
An Improved Spatial Downscaling Procedure
for TRMM 3B43 Precipitation Product Using
Geographically Weighted Regression
Cheng Chen, Shuhe Zhao, Member, IEEE, Zheng Duan, and Zhihao Qin
Abstract—Precipitation data at high spatio-temporal resolu-
tion are essential for hydrological, meteorological, and ecological
research in local basins and regions. The coarse spatial reso-
lution (0.25◦ ) of Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM)
3B43 product is insufficient for practical requirements. In this
paper, a multivariable geographically weighted regression (GWR)
downscaling method was developed to obtain 1 km precipitation.
The GWR method was compared with two other downscaling
methods [univariate regression (UR) and multivariate regression
(MR)] in terms of the performance of downscaled annual precipi-
01 tation. Variables selection procedures were proposed for selecting
appropriate auxiliary factors in all three downscaling methods. To
celo Portuguez obtain the monthly 1 km precipitation, two monthly downscal-
ing strategies (annual-based fraction disaggregation method and
monthly based GWR method) were evaluated. All analysis was
tested in Gansu province, China with a semiarid to arid climate
for three typical years. Validation with measurements from 24 rain
gauge stations showed that the proposed GWR method performed
consistently better than the UR and MR methods. Two monthly
downscaling methods were efficient in deriving the monthly pre-
cipitation at 1 km. The former method faces the challenge of
precipitation spatial heterogeneity and the derived monthly pre-
cipitation heavily depends on the annual downscaled results, which
could lead to the accumulation of errors. The monthly based
GWR method is suitable for downscaling monthly precipitation,
but the accuracy of original TRMM 3B43 data would have large
influence on downscaling results. It was demonstrated that the
proposed method was effective for obtaining both annual and
monthly TRMM 1 km precipitation with high accuracy.
Manuscript received February 06, 2015; revised May 12, 2015; accepted May
27, 2015. Date of publication June 24, 2015; date of current version December
21, 2015. This work was supported in part by the National Basic Research
Program of China under Grant 2010CB951503, in part by the “Strategic Priority
Research Program—Climate Change: Carbon Budget and Related Issues” of
the Chinese Academy of Sciences under Grant XDA0505 0106, and in part by
the Project funded by the Priority Academic Program Development of Jiangsu
Higher Education Institutions (PAPD). (Corresponding authors: Shuhe Zhao
and Zheng Duan.)
C. Chen and S. Zhao are with the School of Geographic and Oceanographic
Sciences, Nanjing University, Nanjing 210023, China, and with the
Jiangsu Provincial Key Laboratory of Geographic Information Science and
Technology, Nanjing University, Nanjing 210023, China, and also with the
Jiangsu Center for Collaborative Innovation in Geographical Information
Resource Development and Application, Nanjing 210023, China (e-mail:
chcheng@whu.edu.cn; zhaosh@nju.edu.cn).
Z. Duan is with Department of Civil Engineering and Geographic Sciences,
Delft University of Technology, 2628 CN Delft, The Netherlands (e-mail:
duanzheng2008@gmail.com).
Z. Qin is with the Institute of Agricultural Resources and Regional Planning,
Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, Beijing 100081, China (e-mail:
zhihaoqin@163.com).
Color versions of one or more of the figures in this paper are available online
at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/JSTARS.2015.2441734
1939-1404 © 2015 IEEE. Personal use is permitted, but republication/redistribution requires IEEE permission.
See http://www.ieee.org/publications_standards/publications/rights/index.html for more information.
Index Terms—Disaggregation, geographically weighted
regression (GWR), multivariate regression (MR), satellite
precipitation, validation.
I. I NTRODUCTION
P RECIPITATION, one of the crucial meteorological ele-
ments of climate change, plays an important role in
atmospheric processes at different temporal and spatial scales.
Precipitation is a major driving force in global climate change,
hydrological cycle, and ecological environment, which is of
significant importance to agricultural irrigation, disaster pre-
vention, and other production activities [1], [2]. The traditional
method to obtain precipitation data is completely dependent
on the observations from point-based rain gauge stations.
However, the method faces challenges in some areas with rare
rain gauge sites, especially in the mountainous and remote
areas. Remote sensing has the advantages of completely scan-
ning the entire region under study, shortly revisiting to the
same region, and conveniently accessing to the data. With the
development of modern remote sensing technology, precipita-
tion could be detected at a regional or global scale. Tropical
Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) precipitation data with a
relatively high-spatial resolution and a relatively large scope of
space had been widely used in recent years [3], [4]. However,
the finest spatial resolution of gridded product of TRMM is
0.25◦ , and this resolution is too coarse for local basin and
regions [5]. Precipitation with high spatio–temporal resolution
and high accuracy is a key input parameter in hydrological
model, which could provide a detailed characterization of the
spatial distribution of flood and drought disasters, debris flow,
and so on, hence the research on spatial downscaling of TRMM
precipitation products from relatively coarse to finer spatial
resolution has attracted more attentions in recent years [5]–[7].
The general spatial downscaling procedure is to construct
the regression relationship between the target variable and its
controlling/influencing variables at the relatively coarse spatial
resolution of the target variable, and then the constructed rela-
tionship is used with the controlling variables at finer spatial
resolution to retrieve the target variable at the same finer res-
olution. The downscaling procedures have been widely used
in many fields to obtain the variables at fine/high resolution,
such as land surface temperature (LST) [8]–[11] and soil mois-
ture [12], [13]. The research on the downscaling of the TRMM
precipitation data is relatively fewer. Considering the close rela-
tionship between the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index
CHEN et al.: IMPROVED SPATIAL DOWNSCALING PROCEDURE FOR TRMM
(NDVI) and precipitation, Immerzeel et al. [5] first constructed
the exponential regression to downscale the TRMM 3B43 data,
and the 1 km TRMM annual precipitation data were obtained on
the Iberian Peninsula. A quadratic polynomial regression rela-
tionship between NDVI and TRMM 3B43 data was established
by Duan and Bastiaanssen [6] to construct the downscaling
model. The calibration procedures using the rain gauges data
were also introduced to improve the accuracy of the downscaled
TRMM annual precipitation, and the annual TRMM precipita-
tion data were also disaggregated to obtain the monthly TRMM
precipitation. The proposed integrated downscaling-calibration
procedure performed well in humid region (Lake Tana Basin
in Ethiopia) and the semiarid region (Caspian Sea Region in
Iran). Jia et al. [2] used a combination of NDVI and Digital
Elevation Model (DEM) in the Qaidam Basin of China to down-
scale TRMM 3B43 precipitation for obtaining the 1 km annual
precipitation. Hunink et al. [7] conducted a research on the esti-
mation of weekly spatial precipitation based on NDVI, DEM,
TRMM-based monthly average rainfall and field observations
in a tropical mountainous region in Ecuador. It was shown that
40% of the variance in this highly variable area was explained
by these proxies with vegetation being the strongest proxy.
Considering the impact of precipitation by multiple factors,
Fang et al. [14] used the slope, aspect, and terrain rough-
ness extracted from DEM, and humidity and temperature from
meteorological conditions, into the multiple linear regression
equation to fit the regression function. All the above stud-
ies were based on the fundamental global regression between
TRMM precipitation data and a variety of auxiliary variables.
The global regression such as ordinary least squares (OLSs)
regression means that the functional relationship is established
using the same model for all the pixels. Although global regres-
sion relationships are relatively well-established, such use of
regression models is based upon the assumption of spatial sta-
tionarity in the relationship between the variables under study
[15]. However, the relationships are often not stable in space.
Tobler’s first law (TFL) [16] shows that everything is related
to everything else, but near things are more related than dis-
tant things. It indicates that geographical entities often have
local properties, and numerous examples in remote sensing-
related literature show the spatial nonstationarity of observed
geographical and ecological patterns and processes in nature
[15], [17]–[19]. Li et al. [20] conducted an investigation of
urban surface temperature and found that the global regression
results in a failure to capture the spatial dependence when it
was applied to geo-referenced data analyses. The meteorologi-
cal variables such as precipitation and temperature are typically
spatial variable. Therefore, the global regression method is of
great limitation in establishing the relationship between tar-
get variable and its controlling variables of the precipitation
downscaling.
Recently, the geographically weighted regression (GWR)
proposed by Brunsdon et al. [21] has been increasingly used
in various fields to detect the spatial nonstationarity. For exam-
ple, Zhao et al. [19] explored spatially variable relationships
between NDVI and climatic factors (annual precipitation and
annual mean temperature) in a transition zone using GWR, and
it was shown that this local regression method is practical for
4593
addressing spatial nonstationary and scale-dependent problems
in landscape ecology. Song et al. [22] developed a satellite-
based GWR model to estimate the daily concentration of
ground-level PM2.5 coincident to satellite overpass at regional
scale. The GWR method was also used to estimate the LST
[23] and urban heat island [24]. To our knowledge, Chen et al.
[25] was the first study, which introduced the GWR method
to downscale the TRMM annual precipitation in north China.
They found that the GWR method could fit the relationship
between NDVI, DEM, and TRMM better than multiple linear
regression method, and the accuracy of the downscaled precip-
itation was significantly improved (e.g., R2 from 0.80 to 0.82,
RMSE from 125.4 to 91.0 mm/year in 2001) compared to the
measurements from 49 rain gauge stations.
As summarized above, there are two main research gaps
to be filled about the GWR-based spatial downscaling proce-
dure of precipitation. The first gap is the limited number of
factors (NDVI and DEM) that are considered; the correlation
between DEM and TRMM precipitation could be insignificant
and not useful in certain regions. The introduction of factors
such as LST, topography (e.g. DEM, Slope, and Aspect), and
geographical location (e.g. Latitude and Longitude) may be
good indications of precipitation in local area of the study area.
The second gap is that almost all previous studies focused on
only annual scale and fewer studies [6] on the downscaling of
the TRMM precipitation at monthly or finer time scales. In the
paper, we aimed at filling the above two gaps by developing a
new multivariable GWR downscaling method to downscale the
TRMM 3B43 precipitation at both annual and monthly scales.
The proposed GWR method was also compared with two other
commonly used downscaling methods, i.e., univariate regres-
sion (UR) and multivariate regression (MR) to demonstrate the
superiority of the proposed method.
II. S TUDY A REA AND DATASETS
A. Study Area
The Gansu province was selected as a case study area in the
paper. Gansu province is located in the northwest of China and
upstream of the Yellow River with the latitude of 32◦ 11 N–
42◦ 57 N and longitude of 92◦ 13 E–108◦ 46 E (Fig. 1). Owing
to the impact of topography, geographical location, and atmo-
spheric circulation, precipitation in Gansu is not only uneven
in spatial distribution, but also great on the annual and inter-
annual variability. Territory of Gansu is vast and accounts for
4.73% of total area of China. It lies in the intersection zone of
Loess Plateaus, the Qinghai Tibet Plateaus, and Inner Mongolia
plateau. Gansu has a complex landform and is very moun-
tainous in the south and flat in the north. The elevations have
greater disparity and the topography is slanted downward in
the northeast direction from the southwest. The area of arable
land is 81.15 million acres, and the rain-fed agriculture and
dryland farming occupy the absolute superiority (80%). Gansu
is landlocked and generally has a semiarid to arid, continental
climate, with warm to hot summers, and cold to very cold win-
ters. The annual average temperature is between 0 and 14 ◦ C
and the annual average precipitation is about 300 mm/year.
4594 IEEE JOURNAL OF SELECTED TOPICS IN APPLIED EARTH OBSERVATIONS AND REMOTE SENSING, VOL. 8, NO. 9, SEPTEMBER 2015
Fig. 1. Geographical location and land cover types of Gansu province in China.
Hill-shade and the location of the rain gauges are superimposed.
Fig. 2. Average monthly precipitation and temperature from 24 rain gauge
stations during 2000–2013 in Gansu, China.
However, as far from the sea, the water vapor transport is
impeded. Consequently, the precipitation in Gansu shows great
spatial variation. The maximum value of annual precipitation
occurs in the southeast of Gansu (700–800 mm/year), and the
minimum value occurs in the northwest (Hexi Corridor, 40–
200 mm/year). Most of the precipitation falls in the summer
months (May–September, Fig. 2). The overall trends of both
temperature and precipitation decrease from the southeast to the
northwest.
B. TRMM 3B43
The TRMM is a joint space mission between National
Aeronautical and Space Administration (NASA) of the USA
and the National Space Development (NASDA) of Japan
designed to monitor and study tropical rainfall. The satel-
lite was launched on November 27, 1997. TRMM 3B43
data cover areas from 50◦ S to 50◦ N latitude, 180◦ W to
180◦ E longitude. The TRMM 3B43 data are on a calendar
month temporal resolution and a 0.25◦ × 0.25◦ spatial res-
olution. The TRMM 3B43 product is processed at monthly
intervals using the TRMM multisatellite precipitation anal-
ysis (TMPA). The TMPA combines multiple independent
precipitation estimates from the TRMM Microwave Image
(TMI), Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer for Earth
Observing Systems (AMSR-E), Special Sensor Microwave
Imager (SSMI), Special Sensor Microwave Imager/Sounder
(SSMIS), Advanced Microwave Sounding Unit (AMSU),
Microwave Humidity Sounder (MHS), microwave-adjusted
merged geo-infrared (IR), and monthly accumulated Global
Precipitation Climatology Centre (GPCC) rain gauge analysis.
The TMPA data take advantage of the fine scales to create aver-
ages appropriate to the user’s application, which has a good
performance at monthly and daily scales. More details on the
TMPA are available through Huffman et al. [26]. The TRMM
3B43 monthly precipitation data in a complete record from
January 1998 to December 2013 used in this paper were freely
available from the NASA database (http://www.nasa.gov/). The
monthly precipitation data were accumulated to obtain the
TRMM annual precipitation.
C. SPOT-NDVI
The used SPOT VGT-S10 products at 1 km resolution were
obtained from http://www.spot-vegetation.com/. The SPOT-
NDVI products are a result of the merging of the NDVI data
strips from 10 consecutive days, and the cloud cover influ-
ences are favorably reduced. Data preprocessing procedures
include geometric, radiometric, and atmospheric corrections.
More details about SPOT VGT-S10 products can be found in
documents available in the link mentioned above. The monthly
NDVI data were acquired by averaging the average values of
the 10-day SPOT-NDVI product. The monthly NDVI data were
averaged to get the annual NDVI.
D. Shuttle Radar Topography Mission Digital Elevation Model
The Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM) is
an international project spearheaded by the National
Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) and the NASA
(http://www.nasa.gov/). The SRTM DEM data at the spatial
resolution of 90 m were used in this study. The 90 m DEM
was resampled to the targeted resolution (e.g., 0.25◦ and 1 km)
using the pixel averaging method during the downscaling
procedures. The variables (slope and aspect data) were further
extracted from the DEM data. In addition, the Longitude
and Latitude data were also extracted from the projection
information of the DEM data.
E. Land Surface Temperature
The Terra-MODIS daytime LST products (MOD11A2)
with 1 km resolution from January 2000 to December 2013
in the study area were obtained from the NASA database
(http://www.nasa.gov/). The MOD11A2 products offer LST
data stored on a 1 km sinusoidal grid as the average values of
clear-sky LSTs during an 8-day period [27]. To eliminate the
influence of cloud, the monthly values of LST were calculated
weighting with the number of days belonging to each month
CHEN et al.: IMPROVED SPATIAL DOWNSCALING PROCEDURE FOR TRMM
based on 8-day LST provided metadata after masking the filled
and missing values [28]. The monthly LST data were averaged
to obtain the annual LST.
F. Rain Gauges Data
A dataset with monthly rain gauges data in Gansu was used
for the validation of the downscaling results. Measurements
from 24 rain gauge stations during 2000–2013 were obtained
from the China Meteorological Data Sharing Service System
(http://data.cma.gov.cn/). The locations of 24 rain gauges are
shown in Fig. 1. The analysis of rain gauges data showed
that average annual precipitation was 280 mm/year during
2000–2013. The year 2005 represents the average year with
290 mm/year, and the year 2007 with 325 mm/year represents
the wet year. The year 2009 is an extremely dry year with
only 230 mm/year of precipitation in Gansu. These three typ-
ical years were selected to evaluate the performance of spatial
downscaling procedures in different climatic conditions.
III. M ETHODOLOGY
The procedures of the methodology in this paper are pre-
sented in this section. The section is divided into five parts. In
Section III-A, the variables selection procedure was proposed
to select the appropriate auxiliary factors to construct three dif-
ferent downscaling methods. The detailed principle explanation
of the GWR method is shown in Section III-B. The spatial
downscaling procedures of TRMM 3B43 annual precipitation
are described in Section III-C. Two downscaling strategies were
also tested to obtain the monthly precipitation at 1 km resolu-
tion, which is detailed in Section III-D. Finally, Section III-E
describes four indices that were computed for validating the
downscaling results.
A. Variables Selection for Spatial Downscaling
As a complex meteorological element, precipitation interacts
with various factors, thus the selection of auxiliary variables
for spatial downscaling would have significant effects on the
results. One critical requirement for the inclusion/selection of
an auxiliary variable in the spatial downscaling procedure is
that this variable should be easily obtainable at fine spatial res-
olutions. In this study, all considered auxiliary variables are the
ones that can be obtained from satellite observations at 1 km
resolution.
The selection of appropriate variables for downscaling
should take the characteristics of a given study area into
account. Gansu is a typical arid and semiarid region in the
northwest of China. The growth of green vegetation mainly
depends on precipitation in Gansu, so it is generally expected
that the more rainfall is and the larger values of NDVI will
be, which forms a close positive relationship between precip-
itation and NDVI. In addition, the topography (e.g., DEM,
Slope, and Aspect) and geographical location (e.g., Latitude
and Longitude) also have significant impact on the precipitation
in the study area. Areas located in low latitude usually have rel-
atively high temperature, evaporation, and water vapor content,
4595
which easily lead to large rainfall. In Gansu, the high longi-
tude will also lead to large rainfall because of the close distance
of the land–sea location. Generally, precipitation increases with
elevation and slope and decreases with aspect due to the topo-
graphical lifting effect on airflow. Jin et al. [29] found that in
east part of northwest China (east of 93◦ E), the precipitation
declined with global warming. Recent studies have confirmed
that LST is highly correlated with air temperature [30], thus
the LST may be also a good indication of precipitation in local
areas of the study area. Moreover, the growth of vegetation is
often influenced by LST and precipitation such as the effect of
drought on vegetation. Therefore, the consideration and addi-
tion of LST in the downscaling procedures could improve in
describing the complex interactions between NDVI and precip-
itation especially at monthly and daily scale, which is expected
to make the spatial downscaling results more realistic. Finally,
a total of seven auxiliary factors (i.e., NDVI, LST, DEM, Slope,
Aspect, Latitude, and Longitude) were considered in the paper.
Three different downscaling methods were considered and eval-
uated further to determine whether each individual variable is
useful or not in the spatial downscaling procedures.
1) UR Method: In general, there is a significant relation-
ship between NDVI and TRMM data at the annual scale [31],
[32]. Accordingly, NDVI is the most common used factor in
the UR method to downscale the TRMM annual precipitation.
However, this relationship between NDVI and TRMM could
be not invariably significant in all regions. Therefore, a simple
linear regression analysis between precipitation and auxiliary
topographical and meteorological variables would be first con-
ducted in different years. The factor with the best correlation
with TRMM precipitation in all years should be considered
as the auxiliary variable. Second, various regression methods
such as polynomial regression, logarithm regression, exponen-
tial regression, and linear regression are compared to choose the
one that results in best fitting.
2) MR Method: The spatial distribution of precipitation in
northwest China is affected by geographical location, topogra-
phy, and other factors as mentioned above, so it is expected that
the MR method would generate better performance. Fang et al.
[14] used several factors such as DEM, slope, aspect, interpo-
lated temperature, and humidity in the MR method to down-
scale the TRMM precipitation data at daily scale. However, an
in-depth analysis often lacks, which would easily lead to the
phenomenon of multicollinearity, which means two or more
individual variables in a multiple regression method are highly
correlated and the coefficient estimates of the multiple regres-
sion may change erratically in response to small changes in the
method. Therefore, the autocorrelation analysis of independent
variables and multicollinear test of linear regression equation
are of great importance in the MR method. Those unsatisfied
factors in the MR method should be eliminated.
3) GWR Method: The above two methods are the global
regression model, which establishes the function relationship
using the same model for all the pixels. In global regres-
sion model, the precipitation responds to changes in inde-
pendent variables that may cause errors in local basins and
regions where precipitation is not governed by the indepen-
dent variables. Considering the precipitation is typically spatial
4596 IEEE JOURNAL OF SELECTED TOPICS IN APPLIED EARTH OBSERVATIONS AND REMOTE SENSING, VOL. 8, NO. 9, SEPTEMBER 2015
nonstationarity and has great spatial variation, it is essential
to develop the GWR method. Because the geographical loca-
tions parameters were already the input in the GWR method,
the Latitude and Longitude data were used as the auxiliary
variables. The regression parameters (1) in the GWR method
should be interpolated into 1 km resolution. To reduce the errors
of the interpolation, the auxiliary variables should be suitable
and reasonable. Therefore, only the auxiliary variables with rel-
atively high correlations with TRMM precipitation were used in
the GWR method.
B. Geographically Weighted Regression
Traditional regression model such as OLS method is estab-
lished on the assumption that the regression relationship
between the variables and the dependent variable remains stable
in the entire region. Precipitation is the interaction result of var-
ious factors. The local precipitation variation typically occurs
at scales of 2 km and larger [5], [33]. Precipitation is typically
spatial nonstationarity and has great spatial differences even in
the same underlying surface. The OLS as a global model cannot
reflect the real spatial characteristics of the regression parame-
ters. On the basis of the study of variable parameters [34] and
local regression, Brunsdon et al. [21] proposed a weighted least
squares regression method. The GWR method is the expansion
of the general linear regression, and it can detect the spatial
heterogeneity by introducing the geographical location into the
regression equation [21], [35]. The general form of GWR is
described in (1)
p
 number of pixels used in the fitting function is decreased, which
yi = β0 (ui , vi ) + βk (ui , vi )xik + εi (1)
k=1
where yi is the i th observation of the dependent variable, xik is
the i th observation of the kth independent variable, the (ui , vi )
represents the geographical coordinates of ith sample point, and
βk (ui , vi ) is the kth regression parameter in the ith regression
point, which is a function of geographical location. εi repre-
sents independent normally distributed error term with zero
mean. Equation (1) can be simplified as
n
 HR represents high/fine spatial resolution at 1 km).
yi = βi0 + βik xik + εi (2)
k=1
when β1 k = β2 k = · · · = βnk , the GWR model degenerates
to a general linear regression model. The parameters were
estimated by the weighted least squares estimation, and the
parameter estimation in the ith sample point can be written as
 −1  T  LongituteLR } are the resampled auxiliary factors at
βi = X T Wi X X Wi Y (3)
where Wi is n × n matrix, and each element of the diagonal
matrix is a function of distance between the observation in the
jth position and regression point in the ith position. The βi in
(3) is the result of the parameter estimation. The common dis-
tance functions include the distance threshold method, inverse
distance method, Gauss function, and the bisquare function
[21]. More details can be found in [21] and [36].
The Gauss function describes the relationship between Wij
and dij using a continuous monotonically decreasing func-
tion. Because of its universal application, the Gauss function
is widely used. The formula is as follows:
 
Wij = exp(− dij /b)2 (4)
where b represents the bandwidth and dij is the distance func-
tion. Qin [36] found that the GWR method is less affected
by the changes of the variable bin, but the parameter b is
sensible to the regression results and can be obtained by
the cross validation. Consequently, the GWR method is suit-
able for detecting the spatial nonstationarity of precipitation.
The econometrics toolbox in MATLAB version 7 (http://
www.spatial-econometrics.com/), which includes the GWR
model was used in this study.
C. Spatial Downscaling Procedures of TRMM 3B43 Annual
Precipitation
To validate the reliability of the relationship between
TRMM precipitation and NDVI at different spatial resolutions,
Immerzeel et al. [5] analyzed the fitting relationships at mul-
tiple scales (0.25◦ −1.25◦ ) and found that the resolution at
0.75◦ was optimal. A multiresolution wavelet analysis, which
is based on the wavelet decomposition and reconstruction, was
used to determine the best regression function in the paper, and
it was found that the regression function became better with
increasing resolutions (0.25◦ −1.0◦ ) (results are not shown for
conciseness). However, with the increase of the resolution, the
in turn reduces the statistical significances of the regression
analysis [6]. Therefore, the original fitting function at 0.25◦ res-
olution was used for establishing the regression relationship.
In addition, we also used the local Moran’s index [2] to detect
and eliminate the outliers of NDVI pixels, which are not gov-
erned by precipitation, but only few pixels were eliminated,
which makes little contributions to the establishment of regres-
sion relationship. The specific steps of the multivariable GWR
downscaling method are described as follows (the superscript
LR represents low spatial resolution at 0.25◦ and the superscript
1) Sum the original 0.25◦ resolution TRMM 3B43 monthly
precipitation to annual precipitation (TRMMLR original ).
{NDVIHR , LSTHR , . . . , LongituteHR } represent the
annual values of the auxiliary factors (e.g. NDVI,
LST, DEM, Slope, Aspect, Latitude, and Longitude) at
1 km resolution, respectively. {NDVILR , LSTLR , . . . ,
0.25◦ resolution.
2) Establish a local regression relationship between
TRMMLR and {NDVILR , LSTLR , . . . ,
original
LongituteLR } by (2), where X represents the auxiliary
factor
N

TRMMLR = β0LR + βkLR XLR
k +ε
LR
. (5)
k=1
CHEN et al.: IMPROVED SPATIAL DOWNSCALING PROCEDURE FOR TRMM
3) Use the weighted least squares estimation to obtain the
model parameters β0LR , β1LR ,. . ., βN
LR
, and the simple
spline interpolation method, which is typically used for
regularly spaced data [5], was implemented to interpolate
the model parameters into 1 km resolution (β0HR , β1HR ,. . .,
βNHR
). The model residual (εLR ), which represents the
part cannot be explained by the auxiliary factors, were
also interpolated into 1 km spatial resolution (εHR ).
4) Following (5), the 1 km TRMM annual precipitation was
then calculated as described in
N
 following four indices in (8)–(11) were computed for validation
TRMMHR = β0HR + βkHR XHR
k +ε
HR
. (6)
k=1
For the UR and MR methods, the downscaling procedures
are basically similar to the above steps. The main difference is
in the second step, and the different regression relationships are
established in different methods. Besides, in the third step, we
only need to interpolate the residual errors into 1 km resolution
in the UR and MR methods.
D. Spatial Downscaling at Monthly Scale
Monthly precipitation data with high resolution are intensely
essential for hydrological, meteorological, and ecological
research in local basins and regions. The monthly precipitation
data at 1 km resolution can provide more information for flood
and drought monitoring. So far, there are few articles about
the monthly downscaling of the TRMM precipitation. Since it
was reported that the vegetation response reflected by NDVI
had a time lag with the cumulative monthly precipitation [37],
[38], using NDVI as the auxiliary variable is significantly lim-
ited in the UR and MR downscaling methods. In the paper,
two monthly downscaling strategies were tested to obtain the
monthly 1 km precipitation.
The first was the annual-based fraction disaggregation
method. Duan and Bastiaanssen [6] used the fraction derived
from original TRMM 3B43 monthly data to disaggregate the
downscaled annual precipitation maps into maps at monthly
time steps. The annual precipitation data were obtained on the
basis of the NDVI–TRMM relationship established by a global
4597
precipitation by establishing the relationship between precipi-
tation and auxiliary factors for each month similar to the annual
downscaling procedure mentioned above.
E. Validation
The measured rainfall data from 24 rain gauge stations
were used to validate the downscaling results of three differ-
ent methods (UR, MR, and GWR) in three typical years (2005,
precipitation average year; 2007, wet year; 2009, dry year). The
purpose.
The coefficient of determination (R2 ): The coefficient of
determination reflects the degree of linear correlation between
satellite precipitation and gauge observations. Formula is as
follows:
⎛  ⎞2
N  
M i − M P i − P
R 2 = ⎝   i
2  2
⎠ (8)
N
i Mi − M P i − P
where Mi represents the ith rain gauge observation, Pi repre-
sents the ith TRMM 3B43 precipitation, M represents the mean
precipitation of the rain gauges data, P represents the mean pre-
cipitation of downscaling results, and N represents the number
of the rain gauges.
The relative bias (Bias): The Bias describes the systematic
bias of satellite precipitation estimates. The smaller absolute
value of Bias indicates the smaller deviation. The value of Bias
greater than zero indicates that satellite precipitation is greater
than the gauge observations, or vice versa. Bias is calculated in
N
Pi
Bias = Ni − 1. (9)
i Mi
The root-mean-square error (RMSE): RMSE is frequently
used to measure the differences between values predicted by a
model or an estimator and the values actually observed, which
describes the average error magnitude in the paper. The small
RMSE means the small error between the downscaling results
and rain gauge observations
regression. In this paper, we also introduced the fraction disag- 
gregation procedures and compared the performances of three N 2
i (Pi − Mi )
annual-based downscaling results by the UR, MR, and GWR RMSE = . (10)
N
methods in three typical years. The fractions are defined in
OrgT RM Mi The mean absolute error (MAE): MAE also represents the
Fi = 12 (7) average magnitude of the error. Because the positive and nega-
i=1 OrgT RM Mi tive offsets will not cancel each other out, the MAE can describe
where the OrgT RM Mi represents the precipitation that occurs the error of downscaling results better
during the ith month in a year as estimated from the original N 2
TRMM 3B43 product. Considering the fractions at 0.25◦ scale i (Pi − Mi )
MAE = . (11)
are regularly spaced, the same simple spline method was used to N
interpolate the fractions into 1 km resolution. Then, the annual
downscaling results of the precipitation data at 1 km scale were IV. R ESULTS AND D ISCUSSION
multiplied by the fractions to get the monthly precipitation in
A. Annual Downscaling Results
2005, 2007, and 2009.
The second was the monthly based GWR method in which 1) Regression Analysis of Three Downscaling Methods:
the GWR method was directly used to downscale the monthly Table I presents the correlation between TRMM 3B43 annual
4598 IEEE JOURNAL OF SELECTED TOPICS IN APPLIED EARTH OBSERVATIONS AND REMOTE SENSING, VOL. 8, NO. 9, SEPTEMBER 2015
TABLE I
R ESULTS OF R EGRESSION A NALYSIS B ETWEEN TRMM 3B43 A NNUAL P RECIPITATION AND AUXILIARY VARIABLES FOR T HREE T YPICAL Y EARS
Fig. 3. Fitting results between NDVI and TRMM annual precipitation in the
UR method.
precipitation and various auxiliary factors in three typical years.
The “multivariate” in Table I means that all the seven factors
were used in the regression analysis.
It can be seen that NDVI has positive and high linear correla-
tions with TRMM annual precipitation in all three typical years,
therefore NDVI can be used as the factor in the UR method to
downscale the TRMM data. Various regression functions were
tested and the quadratic polynomials regression (Fig. 3) was
the optimum with the largest R2 (P < 0.001) in all years.
Eventually the quadratic polynomials regression of NDVI was
selected in the UR method.
After autocorrelation analysis of independent variable factors
and multicollinearity test of linear regression equation, six fac-
tors (NDVI, LST, DEM, Slope, Aspect, and Longitude) were
finally selected in the MR method. The fitting functions in the
MR method for all three years are shown in Table II.
For the GWR method, three variables (NDVI, LST, and
Slope) with higher degrees of correlation were selected as the
regression/independent variables in the GWR method. The spa-
tial distributions of the model parameters, residual and local
R2 for the GWR method in the average 2005 are shown in
Fig. 4 for illustrative purpose. It is shown in Fig. 4(b) that the
slope for NDVI is positively related to precipitation in most
parts of the study area and large values of the slope occur in
the southeast part of the study area. The slope for LST has
large negative values in the southwest of Gansu province with
a relatively high elevation [Fig. 4(c)]. Southwestern Gansu is
mountainous and LST is decreased with the rise of elevation.
Meanwhile the precipitation is increased as the rise of eleva-
tion, thus a negative relationship is generated between LST and
precipitation. In Fig. 4(d), the values are uniform and approxi-
mately equal to zero, suggesting that the slope for the variable
Slope is less important than the other factors. Fig. 4(e) is the
GWR residual map at 1 km resolution. The residual map rep-
resents the part of precipitation that cannot be explained by the
auxiliary factors. Positive values of the residual indicate that the
precipitation is underestimated by the GWR method, while neg-
ative values indicate the overestimate of precipitation. Fig. 4(e)
shows that most of the residual values are within the range of
−50 to 50 mm/year, suggesting that the predicted precipitation
by the GWR method is quite close to the original observations
from TRMM data. Fig. 4(f) shows the spatial distributions of
local coefficient of determination (R2 ) for the GWR method,
with the average value of 0.76 and the range of 0.24–0.98. High
values are distributed in the middle part of Gansu province,
where the values of intercept β0 are large [Fig. 4(a)] and the
spatial variations in slope for NDVI, LST, and Slope are large
[Fig. 4(b)–(d)]. Low values are distributed in the northwest-
ern where desert is the dominant landscape; the southeastern
region where the spatial variations are relatively small also
has low values in spite of large precipitation [Fig. 4(b)–(d)].
This may indicate that the GWR method is more suitable for
the regions where the spatial variations of precipitation and
auxiliary factors are large.
The predictive performance of all three methods (UR, MR,
and GWR) can be evaluated by comparing the predicted annual
precipitation by each method with the original TRMM annual
precipitation at 0.25◦ . Such evaluation was conducted, and the
results are shown in Table III for three different typical years.
Table III shows that the UR method has relatively high degrees
of correlation in three typical years (R2 = 0.80−0.86, RMSE =
91.6−100.0 mm/year, MAE = 62.1−69.9 mm/year). The UR
method using only the NDVI data is very simple, and the
data is easily available. As expected, the MR method, which
introduces more auxiliary factors into the regression equation,
can describe the spatial distribution of the precipitation better,
with higher R2 and lower RMSE and MAE than those in the
UR method. The GWR method has the best performance in
all three typical years, and the RMSE and MAE are reduced
greatly when compared to the UR and MR methods. This is
mainly because the global regression model, which ignores
the spatial heterogeneity of precipitation, has the obvious
phenomenon of over fitting, so it is easy to generate deviations
and extreme values. It can be concluded that the GWR method
is a superior description of spatial distribution of the annual
precipitation in Gansu province.
CHEN et al.: IMPROVED SPATIAL DOWNSCALING PROCEDURE FOR TRMM 4599

TABLE II
R EGRESSION F UNCTIONS IN THE MR M ETHOD FOR T HREE T YPICAL Y EARS

Fig. 4. Spline interpolation results of the estimation parameters at 1 km resolution in GWR model in the average year 2005. (a) Intercept β0 . (b) Slope β1 for
NDVI. (c) Slope β2 for LST. (d) Slope β3 for Slope. (e) Residuals. (f) Local R2 .

TABLE III
E VALUATION R ESULTS OF THE UR, MR, AND GWR M ETHODS U SING
THE O RIGINAL TRMM 3B43 DATA FOR T HREE T YPICAL Y EARS
As far as the performances in different years are concerned,
the best fitting was in the average precipitation year 2005.
The wet year 2007 was the least optimal among three years,
which indicates the explanatory ability of the auxiliary variables
becoming weak as the increasing of precipitation. This may be
because that the large rainfall could be caused by more complex
processes, such as the climate anomaly and atmospheric circu-
lation, which cannot be well explained by the topographical and
meteorological factors used in this paper. The extremum formu-
lations of exponential regression, which performs better even
for very wet years, maybe a good choice in elsewhere. However,
this method could lead to over-fitting and is unsuitable for
multivariable auxiliary factors.
2) Downscaling Results: The downscaling results in the
average year 2005 are shown, e.g., in Fig. 5. Fig. 5(a) shows
the original TRMM annual precipitation at 0.25◦ . Fig. 5(b)–(d)
shows the downscaled annual precipitation at 1 km resolution
using the UR, MR, and GWR methods, respectively. The white
regions (no data) shown in Fig. 5(b)–(d) represent the outliers
with extreme high or low values.
It can be found in Fig. 5(b) and (c) that there are many
outliers in the downscaling results. The reason for that is
the regression functions of the UR and MR methods estab-
lished in the entire area, thus a lot of independent variables
are difficult to fully fit, which easily leads to the over-fitting
phenomenon. Therefore, these global regression methods have
4600 IEEE JOURNAL OF SELECTED TOPICS IN APPLIED EARTH OBSERVATIONS AND REMOTE SENSING, VOL. 8, NO. 9, SEPTEMBER 2015
Fig. 5. Overview of the annual downscaling results in 2005. (a) Original TRMM precipitation data at 0.25◦ resolution. (b)–(d) Downscaling results of the UR,
MR, and GWR methods, respectively.
great limitations when used for the downscaling of precipita-
tion. The GWR method, which allows different relationships to
exist at different locations, can visually detect the spatial het-
erogeneity of precipitation. The GWR method can construct
the robust local regression equation, and thus it can reduce the
outliers significantly.
From the downscaling results of the TRMM annual precip-
itation, we can find that rainfall in Gansu province is slanted
downward in the northwest direction from the southeast. The
annual precipitation in the Hexi Corridor northwest of Gansu
is intensely scarce, and the annual precipitation of the Loess
Plateau area in the middle of Gansu is relatively small, whereas
the maximum annual precipitation is located in the east of
Gansu. The precipitation is significantly related with geographi-
cal location. The main land cover type in Jiuquan city northwest
of Gansu is bare land (see Fig. 1). The small amounts of farm-
land and grassland in the central area of Jiuquan city make
the NDVI values larger than the surrounding area. The variable
NDVI presents larger contributions in the UR and MR methods,
and there are positive correlations between NDVI and down-
scaling results of precipitation, which means the larger values
of NDVI reflect higher precipitation. So the downscaling results
of precipitation in the area are larger than the surrounding area
[black rectangle frame in Fig. 5(b) and (c)]. In fact, the north-
west of Gansu is a typical arid area with little rainfall, and the
growth of green vegetation mainly depends on the irrigation and
groundwater (protected farmland). The precipitation is obvi-
ously overestimated by global regression methods of the UR
and MR in the area. The local fitting results of parameters are
weighted to the sampling point to establish a robust regression
equation. The multivariable GWR method could avoid over-
fitting [black rectangle frame in Fig. 5(d)] and is more suitable
for the downscaling of precipitation.
Fig. 6(a)–(c) presents the comparisons between measure-
ments from 24 rain gauge stations and the downscaled precip-
itation from three downscaling methods: UR, MR, and GWR
methods, respectively. The horizontal axis represents the rain
gauges measured data, and the vertical axis represents the
downscaled results of the TRMM precipitation data at 1 km
resolution. For comparison, Fig. 6(d) represents the fitting rela-
tionship between the rain gauges data and the original TRMM
precipitation data at 0.25◦ .
It can be seen from Fig. 6(a)–(c) that different downscaling
methods have different results, and the coefficients of the deter-
mination (R2 ) in the average year 2005 are 0.660, 0.685, and
0.833, respectively. The UR method had the worst result, which
indicates the single factor of NDVI is insufficient to describe
the spatial distribution of the precipitation. Besides, the values
of RMSE, Bias and MAE of the MR and UR methods are basi-
cally the same (Table IV). The MR method with relatively small
values of MAE and RMSE has a better performance than the
UR method. However, in the meteorological sites of Zhangye
and Wuwei [black rectangular frame in Fig. 6(a) and (b)], the
precipitation estimated by the UR and MR methods is greatly
overestimated. The NDVI, which is one of the most crucial
parameters in the regression model, has a large change from
0.25◦ to 1 km in the two sites. The values of NDVI in Zhangye
and Wuwei at 0.25◦ resolution are 0.22 and 0.26 and at 1 km
CHEN et al.: IMPROVED SPATIAL DOWNSCALING PROCEDURE FOR TRMM 4601

Fig. 7. Time series of the coefficients of determination (R2 ) between the

original 0.25◦ TRMM 3B43 monthly data, annual-based GWR fraction disag-
gregation downscaling results, monthly based GWR downscaling results (only
in May, June, and September), and the monthly rain gauges data in 2005, 2007,
and 2009.
Fig. 6. Validation results in 2005 using 24 rain gauges precipitation for three
downscaled TRMM precipitation at 1 km resolution. (a)–(c) UR, MR, and
GWR methods. (d) Original 0.25◦ resolution TRMM precipitation.

TABLE IV
VALIDATION R ESULTS U SING 24 R AIN G AUGES P RECIPITATION FOR
T HREE T YPICAL Y EARS

Fig. 8. Time series of the MAE of the UR, MR, and GWR methods and the
average monthly precipitation in 2005, 2007, and 2009 of the Gansu province.

(large values of Bias, RMSE, and MAE) between the origi-

nal TRMM data and the rain gauges data despite of high R2
shown in Table IV. As shown in Fig. 6(d), the TRMM 3B43
resolution are 0.31 and 0.37, respectively. The mismatch errors
data overestimated the precipitation in the study area. Since
at different scales make the downscaled precipitation overes-
all downscaling procedures are based on the original TRMM
timated. The GWR method, which constructs the robust local
3B43 data, the errors in TRMM 3B43 data would be inevitably
regression function, can reduce the scale mismatch errors to
introduced in the downscaled precipitation. Therefore, the orig-
some extent [Fig. 6(c)]. The GWR method with largest R2 and
inal TRMM 3B43 data need more improvements using more
smallest Bias, RMSE, and MAE is better than the UR and MR
advanced estimation algorithms and integrating more rainfall
methods in three typical years (Table IV). However, consider-
datasets from microwave and geostationary satellite sensors as
ing the annual average precipitation is about 300 mm/year, the
well as ground-based radar and gauge stations.
GWR downscaled precipitation still has quite large errors.
Previous studies [39]–[41] had shown that both temporal
errors (±8% to ±12% per month) and sampling errors (approx-
imately 30%) could be expected in TRMM rainfall estimates. B. Monthly Downscaling Results
Such errors can result in erroneous applications if without 1) Annual-Based Fraction Disaggregation Results: On the
calibration. Therefore, many researchers had made the corre- basis of annual downscaling results, we used the frac-
sponding research [40], [42]. There are significant deviations tion disaggregation method to obtain the monthly TRMM
4602 IEEE JOURNAL OF SELECTED TOPICS IN APPLIED EARTH OBSERVATIONS AND REMOTE SENSING, VOL. 8, NO. 9, SEPTEMBER 2015
TABLE V
R ESULTS OF R EGRESSION A NALYSIS B ETWEEN P RECIPITATION AND AUXILIARY VARIABLES
precipitation in three typical years. Three different annual
downscaled precipitation data, which were obtained by the
UR, MR, and GWR methods, were disaggregated to get the
monthly precipitation. Fig. 7 shows the R2 between original
0.25◦ TRMM 3B43 monthly data, annual-based GWR frac-
tion disaggregation downscaling results, monthly based GWR
downscaling results, and the monthly rain gauges data in three
typical years. Considering that most of the precipitation occurs
in the summer months (May–September), we only tested the
monthly based GWR downscaling method in May, July, and
September for each typical year. It was shown that the R2 are
mainly from 0.4 to 0.8, and the low R2 are mostly observed
for months with little rainfall (from November to February of
the following year). The R2 of annual- and monthly based are
basically the same with the results of original 0.25◦ TRMM
3B43 data. The annual-based fraction disaggregation method
has relatively large R2 . It can be seen from Fig. 8 that the
MAE of the annual-based fraction disaggregation downscal-
ing results, which based on three different regression methods
(UR, MR, and GWR), point toward the same trend with the
monthly rainfall. The monthly MAE values of annual-based
GWR method are lower than the values of annual-based UR
and MR methods, especially in summer months. In other words,
annual-based GWR fraction disaggregation downscaling results
have the smallest errors. It indicated that annual-based GWR
fraction disaggregation method is effective for the downscaling
of the monthly precipitation in the study area.
2) Monthly Based GWR Downscaling Results: The annual-
based GWR fraction disaggregation method could effectively
downscale the monthly TRMM precipitation and produce small
errors. However, this downscaling procedure, which acquires
the monthly fractions at 1 km scale by a simple spline inter-
polator, ignores the spatial heterogeneity of precipitation. In
addition, the fraction disaggregation results are based on the
downscaling results of annual precipitation, which could cause
the accumulation of errors. Therefore, in this paper, we also
tried the monthly based GWR method directly to downscale
the monthly precipitation data. This monthly based GWR
downscaling procedure is similar to the downscaling of annual
precipitation. Similarly, we only tested the downscaling results
in May, July, and September of 2005, 2007, and 2009. The
results of regression analysis between precipitation and auxil-
iary variables are shown in Table V. It can be found that the R2
of the NDVI, Slope, Longitude, and Latitude are lower than the
annual results, but the R2 of the LST are larger than the annual
TABLE VI
VALIDATION R ESULTS OF THE M ONTHLY P RECIPITATION DATA
O BTAINED BY THE M ONTHLY-BASED GWR M ETHOD
results. The relatively low R2 values indicate the significant
limitation in TRMM precipitation downscaling by the UR and
MR methods when they are used at monthly scale. The GWR
method based on the local regression may be a good selection to
downscale the monthly TRMM 3B43 data in the study area. The
NDVI, LST, and Slope were also selected to construct the GWR
model. The R2 between the original TRMM 3B43 monthly data
and the predictive results range from 0.93 to 0.98 for three
typical years; it indicates an excellent performance in spatial
distribution of the monthly based GWR downscaling method in
Gansu province of China.
Similarly, the monthly based GWR downscaling results were
also validated using the rain gauges data. The validation results
are shown in Table VI and the results show that the GWR
method can downscale the monthly precipitation with relatively
higher R2 and lower MAE. However, the original 0.25◦ TRMM
3B43 monthly data also have considerable discrepancies with
the rain gauge measurements, which have a significant impact
on the downscaling results. As a whole, the annual-based
GWR fraction disaggregation downscaling results have larger
R2 value than the monthly based GWR method. However,
this method ignores the precipitation spatial heterogeneity,
whereas the monthly based GWR method can compensate
for the deficits. Subjectivity aside, the monthly based GWR
method also has some disadvantages. For example, this method
needs suitable auxiliary factors, and these factors would be
diverse in different regions and may fail in certain regions.
Although the monthly based method has a good performance
CHEN et al.: IMPROVED SPATIAL DOWNSCALING PROCEDURE FOR TRMM
in the study area, it still needs to be verified for different time
scales in different regions. Consequently, two monthly based
downscaling methods mentioned in the paper have their own
merits and could be used to downscale the TRMM monthly
precipitation. The monthly based GWR downscaling method
may be more suitable when the original TRMM data can be
obtained at high accuracy.
V. S UMMARY AND C ONCLUSION
The objective of this study was to obtain the annual and
monthly precipitation at 1 km resolution with high accuracy in
Gansu, China. To achieve this objective, a new multivariable
GWR method was developed to downscale the TRMM 3B43
annual precipitation at 0.25◦ to precipitation at 1 km resolu-
tion. The GWR downscaling method was evaluated in Gansu
for three typical precipitation years (average, wet, and dry).
Two other downscaling methods, i.e., UR and MR were also
implemented and compared with the developed GWR method.
The variables selection procedure was proposed, and appro-
priate variables were finally determined for three different
downscaling methods. Appropriate variable(s) for the UR
method was NDVI, for the MR method were six factors,
i.e., NDVI, LST, DEM, Slope, Aspect, and Latitude, for the
GWR were multivariable NDVI, LST, and Slope. The measured
precipitation data from 24 rain gauge stations were used to vali-
date the downscaled precipitation by three methods. Validation
results showed that the simplest UR method was feasible for
obtaining the 1 km TRMM precipitation to a certain extent.
With inclusion of more auxiliary factors, the MR method gener-
ated better results as expected. Both UR and MR methods were
based on the assumption that global regression relationship is
stable in the entire region, and they ignore the spatial hetero-
geneity of precipitation, which could easily lead to over-fitting
and is more sensitive to scale mismatch errors. In contrast, the
multivariable GWR method can capture the variation by cali-
brating spatial-varying multiple regression models at different
locations, thereby being able to detect the space nonstationarity
of precipitation. Validation results clearly demonstrated that the
GWR method performed significantly and consistently better
than both UR and MR methods for all three typical years.
Two monthly downscaling strategies were evaluated to
obtain the monthly precipitation at 1 km resolution; they are the
annual-based fraction disaggregation method and the monthly
based GWR method. It was shown that the annual-based GWR
fraction disaggregation method was performing better than the
other method, especially in summer months. However, it faces
two major shortcomings. The first is that the monthly fractions
at 1 km resolution were obtained by a simple spline inter-
polation method, which ignores the spatial heterogeneity of
precipitation; the other one is the monthly downscaling results
are on the basis of the annual downscaling results, which could
easily lead to the accumulation of errors. The monthly based
GWR method producing high R2 and low MAE has an excel-
lent performance in spatial distribution of precipitation in the
study area. Two methods could be used for the downscaling of
the TRMM monthly data, and the monthly based GWR method
is more suitable for the monthly downscaling when the original
TRMM 3B43 data can be obtained with high accuracy.
4603
The original TRMM 3B43 data at 0.25◦ spatial resolution
have considerable discrepancies from the rain gauge mea-
surements. Since all downscaling procedures are based on the
original TRMM 3B43 data, the accuracy of TRMM 3B43 data
directly determines the accuracy of downscaled precipitation
no matter what methods are used. Future work should focus on
the downscaling and calibration simultaneously for obtaining
better precipitation for a given study area. Testing the proposed
GWR downscaling method for higher temporal scales (e.g.,
weekly and daily) in different climatic regions would be
interesting topics in future studies. It is worth noting that future
availability of TRMM data is not assured, thus integrating
multisources satellite precipitation data to obtain high accuracy
rainfall at high spatio-temporal resolution would also be a
popular tendency in future.
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Cheng Chen was born in Suqian, Jiangsu, China,
in 1990. He received the B.Eng. degree in survey-
ing and mapping engineering from Wuhan University,
Wuhan, China, in 2013. He is currently pursuing the
M.S. degree in photogrammetry and remote sensing
at Nanjing University, Nanjing, China.
His research interests include land use and land
cover change, satellite-based precipitation, drought
monitoring, and remote sensing image processing.
Shuhe Zhao (M’03) received the Ph.D. degree from
Nanjing University, Nanjing, China, in 2003.
From 2003 to 2005, he was a Research Fellow
with the Institute of Remote Sensing & GIS,
Peking University, Beijing, China. He is currently
a Vice Director and Associate Professor with the
Department of Geographic Information Science,
School of Geographic and Oceanographic Sciences,
Nanjing University. From 2009 to 2009, he is
an Academic Visitor at the School of Geography,
University of Southampton, Southampton, U.K. From
May 2013 to June 2013, he visited the Department of Environment and
Geographic Science, University of Cape Town, Cape Town, South Africa.
From 2013 to 2014, he worked as a Visiting Professor at the School of
Civil and Environmental Engineering, Yonsei University, Yonsei, Korea. His
research interests include hyperspectral remote sensing, ecological remote sens-
ing and global change, and application of pattern recognition methods in remote
sensing.
Zheng Duan received the M.S. degree in cartogra-
phy and GIS from the Graduate University of Chinese
Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China, in 2010 and
the Ph.D. degree in remote sensing and hydrologi-
cal model from Delft University of Technology, Delft,
The Netherlands, in 2014.
He was a Scientific Consultant with several
institutes including UNESCO-IHE, Delft, The
Netherlands, in the field of satellite-based estimation
of actual evapotranspiration, soil moisture and
biomass production, and land cover classification.
From July 2015, he is an Assistant Professor with the Technische Universität
München, München, Germany. His research interests include integration of
remote sensing in hydrological model and water balance studies of lakes and
catchments, satellite-based precipitation, evapotranspiration, and open water
evaporation estimation.
Zhihao Qin received the B.Sc. degree in economic
geography from the Department of Geography, Sun
Yetsen University, Guangzhou, China, in 1983, and
the Ph.D. degree in remote sensing of arid envi-
ronment from the Remote Sensing Laboratory, J.
Blaustein Institute for Desert Researches, Ben Gurion
University of the Negev, Israel, in 2001.
Currently, he is a Professor of Remote Sensing
Applications to Agriculture with the Institute of
Agro-Resources and Regional Planning, Chinese
Academy of Agricultural Sciences, Beijing, China.
He has authored 150 papers, including the extensively cited one on mono-
window algorithm for land surface temperature retrieval from Landsat
TM/ETM thermal band data. His research interests include thermal remote
sensing, remote sensing and GIS applications to agriculture, agro-disasters
monitoring, and regional planning for agricultural development.
Annotations

An Improved Spatial Downscaling Procedure for TRMM 3B43

Precipitation Product Using Geographically Weighted
Regression
Chen, Cheng; Zhao, Shuhe; Duan, Zheng; Qin, Zhihao

01 Marcelo Portuguez Page 2

18/5/2018 23:57