Journal of Hydrology 574 (2019) 699–705

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Journal of Hydrology
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jhydrol

Review papers

Precipitation frequency analysis from remotely sensed datasets: A focused T

review
⁎
Francesco Marraa, , Efthymios I. Nikolopoulosb, Emmanouil N. Anagnostoub, András Bárdossyc,
Efrat Morina
a
Institute of Earth Sciences, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Israel
b
Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT, USA
c
Institute for Modelling Hydraulic and Environmental Systems, University of Stuttgart, Stuttgart, Germany

A R T I C LE I N FO A B S T R A C T

This manuscript was handled by Marco Borga, Information on extreme precipitation is essential to managing weather-related risks and designing hydraulic
Editor-in-Chief structures. Research attention to frequency analyses based on remotely sensed precipitation datasets, such as
Keywords: those obtained from weather radars and satellites, has been rapidly increasing owing to their potential to provide
Frequency analysis information for ungauged regions worldwide. Together with the ability to measure the areal scale directly, these
Remote sensing analyses promise to overcome the sampling limitations of traditional methods based on rain gauges. This focused
Extreme precipitation review of the literature depicts the state of the art after a decade of efforts, and identifies the crucial gaps in
Weather radar knowledge and methodology that currently hinder the quantitative use of remotely sensed datasets in water
Satellite
resources system design and operation. It concludes by highlighting a set of research directions promising im-
Review
mediate impact with regard to the separation of the sources of uncertainty currently affecting applications based
on remotely sensed datasets, the development of statistical methods that can cope with the peculiar char-
acteristics of these datasets, and the improvement of validation methods. Important gains in knowledge are
expected from the explicit inclusion of the areal dimension in the analyses and from the fine-scale investigation
of extreme precipitation climatology.

1. Introduction duration to its probability of exceedance at a specific location, the so-

Information on extreme precipitation is essential to understanding
extreme weather, issuing warnings, managing weather-related risks and
insurance, and designing hydraulic structures (Katz et al., 2002). This
focused review of the recent literature on precipitation frequency
analysis based on remotely sensed datasets aims, first, to depict the
state of the art; second, to identify the crucial gaps in knowledge and
methodology; and, third, to propose research directions toward making
those advances that promise immediate impact.
Water resources design requires knowledge on the extreme pre-
cipitation that falls within a given area (e.g. a basin) and time interval
(characteristic of each basin). The importance of both spatial variability
and duration complicates the investigation of extreme precipitation. As
precipitation is traditionally measured at selected locations, little is
known about its variability in space. In fact, only precipitation extremes
corresponding to different durations are usually analyzed to derive
analytical relationships linking the precipitation intensity at a given
called intensity-duration-frequency curves. Such relationships generally
consist of extreme value distributions fitting the tail of the precipitation
intensity distribution, chosen either as the annual maxima (annual
maxima series, or AMS) or the values exceeding a high threshold (peaks
over threshold, or PoT). Extreme value theory (Fischer and Tippett,
1928; Gnedenko, 1943) provides the statistical background: under
some general assumptions, the extremes of large samples of in-
dependent and identically distributed random variables can only con-
verge to the generalized extreme value (in the case of AMS) or the
generalized Pareto (PoT) distributions. To grant a good fit, long records
of homogeneous data are required. When these are not available, re-
gionalization approaches can be used to pool data from multiple loca-
tions (Buishand, 1991).
Precipitation extremes at different durations are strongly related to
each other. Parametric functions (Koutsoyiannis et al., 1988), simple-
scaling (Menabe et al., 1999; Innocenti et al., 2017), or multi-scaling
approaches (Langousis and Veneziano, 2007; Langousis et al., 2009;

⁎
Corresponding author at: Fredy & Nadine Herrmann Institute of Earth Sciences, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, E.J. Safra Campus - Givat Ram, Jerusalem
9190401, Israel.
E-mail address: marra.francesco@mail.huji.ac.il (F. Marra).

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhydrol.2019.04.081
Received 28 October 2018; Received in revised form 10 March 2019; Accepted 25 April 2019
Available online 27 April 2019
0022-1694/
F. Marra, et al.
Veneziano et al., 2007, 2009) can be used to describe these relation-
ships, reducing the number of parameters and enabling interpolation-
based regionalization (Nhat et al., 2008). The interpolation is, however,
nontrivial, as interparameter relationships need to be considered. The
spatial variability of precipitation extremes is then considered, defining
area reduction factors (ARFs) to convert the point scale to the areal
scale of hydrological interest (Svensson and Jones, 2010), or including
the precipitation correlation structure in the analysis (Sivapalan and
Blöschl, 1998). Because of the sparseness and point nature of rain
gauges worldwide (Kidd et al., 2017), the resulting design values can be
highly uncertain. In addition, it is almost sure that the maximal pre-
cipitation intensity during an event will not be captured by the rain
gauge networks, potentially leading to increased uncertainties in the
derived quantiles.
Ground-based weather radars estimate precipitation at the regional
scale with resolutions of 1–2 km, 5–10 min, whereas satellite-based
precipitation products currently reach around 4 km, half hourly re-
solutions, with quasi-global coverage (Michaelides et al., 2009). These
capabilities give remotely sensed datasets (RSDs) the potential to
overcome the sampling limitations of gauges (Collier et al., 1989). Their
records are, however, recent, spanning around 10–30 years, and tend to
have estimation errors, so their use for frequency analysis is not
straightforward (Villarini and Krajewski, 2010; Kidd and Levizzani,
2011). Pioneering studies sought to derive ARFs, relying on the ex-
pectation that estimation and fitting uncertainties would diminish
when consistent data sources were used for both point and areal scales
(Frederick et al., 1977; Stewart 1989; Bacchi and Ranzi, 1996; Durrans
et al., 2002; Allen and De Gaetano, 2005; Lombardo et al., 2006;
Olivera et al., 2008; Overeem et al., 2010). The direct use of RSDs for
precipitation frequency analysis began only in the last decade (Overeem
et al., 2009; Endreny and Imbeah, 2009), but the number of studies has
been rapidly increasing in the wake of proliferating data records, im-
proving estimation methods, and methodological advances.
This focused review collects the state of the art on precipitation
frequency analysis based on remotely sensed datasets. Particular at-
tention is given to the studies which proposed innovative approaches to
exploit the available information, innovative statistical methods to treat
the short remote sensing data records, or innovative contributions to
body of knowledge concerning the climatology of extremes.
2. State of the art
Precipitation frequency analyses based on RSDs have four main
objectives: (a) to derive high quantiles for design applications; (b) to
enable extreme precipitation monitoring and early warning; (c) to de-
rive subdaily precipitation quantiles through temporal downscaling of
daily/multi-daily gauge observations; and (d) to obtain insights into the
climatology of extreme precipitation. In general, the dataset native
spatial resolution is kept unchanged, while data are aggregated in time
to gather information on subdaily durations, in the case of radar
(∼15′–24 h), and longer durations (mostly daily) for satellite data.
Subdaily analyses from satellite data are also reported.
2.1. Derivation of high quantiles for design applications
Despite the length of the records (30 or so years at most, but often
only around 10–20 years), information on high quantiles (with return
periods of 100, or even 1,000, years) is sought (Overeem et al., 2009;
Wright et al., 2013; Gado et al., 2017) for hydrological design in un-
gauged regions. With such a mismatch between available data records
and quantiles of interest, large uncertainties are expected in the ex-
treme value analyses (Papalexiou and Koutsoyiannis, 2013). PoT should
be preferred over AMS, since a larger data sample can be exploited and
the parameter estimation uncertainty reduced. When dealing with
distributed data, however, the problem of threshold selection becomes
challenging because of the need to operate automatically at each grid
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Journal of Hydrology 574 (2019) 699–705
point while maintaining spatial consistency (Langousis et al., 2016a,b).
Most studies so far have relied on AMS (Endreny and Imbeah, 2009;
Pombo and de Oliveira, 2015; Faridzad et al., 2018; Ombadi et al.,
2018), sometimes drawing upon regionalization to reduce the un-
certainty. Only rarely is the PoT approach undertaken (Goudenhoofdt
et al., 2017; Demirdjian et al., 2018).
Validation of the obtained quantiles against collocated gauges
shows large uncertainties, explained by the short data records, which
can be reduced using regionalization methods (Overeem et al., 2009;
Eldardiry et al., 2015; Goudenhoofdt et al., 2017; Demirdjian et al.,
2018). Important systematic biases are reported, with both under-
estimation (Overeem et al., 2009; Eldardiry et al., 2015; Pombo and de
Oliveira, 2015) and overestimation (Marra and Morin, 2015) with re-
spect to the reference gauge-derived quantiles. The underestimation is
likely caused by conditional bias in extreme precipitation estimates
both in radar (Berne and Krajewski, 2013) and satellite (Kidd and
Levizzani, 2011) products, while overestimation is likely caused by
inflated variance in the presence of large random errors (Marra and
Morin, 2015) and by uncertain quantification of the tail of the dis-
tribution in presence of short records (Papalexiou and Koutsoyiannis,
2013).
2.2. Enabling of extreme precipitation monitoring and early warning
Frequency information from RSDs can be exploited to calculate
extreme quantiles for real-time monitoring and early warning over
ungauged or poorly gauged areas (Borga et al., 2014). Extreme quan-
tiles derived from RSDs are used to define thresholds and, when the
monitoring/early warning system is fed using information from the
same dataset, systematic biases are expected to be largely reduced
(Zhou et al., 2015). Real-time operational applications are generally
based on relatively low quantiles (up to 25 years return period), so the
inaccuracy related to the short records is expected to be considerably
reduced. The application of radar-based tools in gauged areas shows
good potential for complementing operational nowcasting systems
(Panziera et al., 2016), and the implementation of satellite-based sys-
tems to monitor ungauged areas is deemed promising (Zhou et al.,
2015), particularly when the uncertainties related to extreme value
analysis are diminished (Demirdjian et al., 2018).
2.3. Derivation of subdaily precipitation quantiles through temporal
downscaling of precipitation extremes
Temporal statistics of the precipitation indirect measurements can
be used to downscale daily or monthly observations to short-scale ex-
tremes. Relationships between short-scale and aggregated statistics can
be derived from satellite products (Awadallah et al., 2011; Awadallah
and Awadallah, 2013) and combined with ground observations to ob-
tain local statistics. Another possibility is to combine the relative dis-
tribution of precipitation directly from the radar with observed high
precipitation amounts available for daily time aggregations (Bardossy
and Pegram, 2017). The derivation of areal precipitation statistics is
also possible.
2.4. Obtaining of insights into the climatology of extreme precipitation
Improved knowledge on the spatial distribution of precipitation
frequency can shed light on the factors driving and modulating extreme
precipitation. Analyses using RSDs can identify spatial gradients with
unprecedented resolution (Demirdjian et al., 2018). Direct comparisons
of frequency analyses based on radar and satellite products aggregated
to common spatiotemporal resolution have shown good correlation in
the estimated quantiles, mutually confirming the spatial patterns re-
ported by completely different observation geometries and retrieval
methods (Marra et al., 2017), and pointing, for example, to distinct
differences between extremes in close by arid and Mediterranean
F. Marra, et al.
regions (Marra and Morin, 2015; Marra et al., 2017).
3. Methodological gaps
Two main issues reportedly decrease the quantitative accuracy of
frequency analyses based on RSDs: the quantitative inaccuracy of ex-
treme precipitation estimates and the inadequacy of the adopted sta-
tistical methods. In addition, our review underlines a third issue: a lack
of proper reference data and validation methods.
3.1. Quantitative inaccuracy of extreme precipitation estimates
Weather radar and satellite-based estimates, due to the indirect
precipitation retrievals, are affected by a variety of sources of error, in
particular when extremes are considered (Villarini and Krajewski,
2010; AghaKouchak et al., 2011; Nastos et al., 2013; Miao et al., 2015;
Prakash et al., 2015; Eldardiry et al., 2017). These problems generally
manifest as underestimation of extreme precipitation, leading to sys-
tematic underestimation of the high quantiles (see, for example,
Eldardiry et al., 2015), or large estimation uncertainties (random er-
rors), increasing the likelihood of overestimating the AMS/PoT and,
thus, the extrapolated quantiles (Haberlandt and Berndt, 2016; Marra
et al., 2018). Fig. 1 shows the estimated uncertainties caused by esti-
mation errors, use of short records, and mismatch between the areal
and point scales in hourly precipitation quantiles in Mediterranean
climate. Artefacts caused by retrieval algorithms or measurement errors
can mask the climatic signals or cause misinterpretation of climatolo-
gical analyses based on RSDs (Figs. 2 and 3). For instance, small water
bodies such as the lakes, portions of the Red Sea and even the Nile delta
(Fig. 2a) or the big lakes region (Fig. 3) appear as areas with increased
quantiles, whereas the coastal gradient observed in the Eastern Medi-
terranean shoreline by passive microwave sensors (Fig. 2a) is confirmed
as a climatic signal by radar estimates (Fig. 2b). In addition, possible
changes in time of hardware and/or data elaboration chain may in-
troduce time-dependent errors whose impact is not well understood.
The conditional bias in RSDs can be decreased using standard adjust-
ment procedures (Overeem et al., 2009; Faridzad et al., 2018), or
probability matching methods (Gado et al., 2017; Goudenhoofdt et al.,
Fig. 1. Uncertainties (90 percent confidence interval) in the one-hour duration
intensities (generalized extreme value fit of the AMS, method of the linear
moments) caused by (a) estimation errors (blue), (b) use of short records
(green), and (c) mismatch between the areal and point scales (red)—for a rain
gauge located in Mediterranean climate (Galed, Israel). Reference is provided
by the full record (51 years) of rain gauge estimates. Estimation errors (a) are
modeled as 25 percent random multiplicative error in the AMS (blue). Short
records (b) are modeled bootstrapping with replacement 25 years out of the full
station record (51 years) (green). Scale mismatch (c) is derived from the ana-
lyses by Peleg et al. (2018), based on a dense gauge network in the Galed gauge
area and maximum likelihood estimation of the generalized extreme value
parameters (red).
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Journal of Hydrology 574 (2019) 699–705
2017) benchmarked on gauge measurements. The impact of random
errors can be reduced by pooling data from homogeneous regions
(Demirdjian et al., 2018) or near-by pixels (Goudenhoofdt et al., 2017)
and adopting classic regionalization schemes.
3.2. Inadequacy of the adopted statistical methods
The short record length represents a crucial drawback for RSD-
based analyses. First, large uncertainties are caused by the use of few
data points to estimate the parameters of extreme value distributions,
with a tendency toward overestimation of their tails (Sornette, 2003;
Eldardiry et al., 2015; Marra et al., 2018); second, the sample of ex-
treme climatology is incomplete, potentially biasing the estimation of
high quantiles (Marani and Zanetti, 2015). Regionalization methods
(Overeem et al., 2009; Endreny and Imbeah, 2009; Overeem et al.,
2010; Eldardiry et al., 2015; Panziera et al., 2016; Gado et al., 2017) or
stochastic storm transposition (Wright et al., 2013; Wright et al., 2017)
can be beneficial in reducing the issues related to parameter estimation
(Fig. 4), but require hypotheses on the spatial homogeneity of extreme
precipitation that are sometimes difficult to support—for instance,
when the study involves ungauged areas or regions characterized by
strong climatic gradients (Marra and Morin, 2015). Viable ways to
overcome this problem are to use data-driven regionalization techni-
ques (Paixao et al., 2015; Demirdjian et al., 2018) or to exploit the
gridded structure of RSDs defining pixel-centered regions
(Goudenhoofdt et al., 2017). The PoT approach is used to improve the
parameter estimation, at the price of requiring an automatic threshold
selection method (Fukutome et al., 2015; Solari et al., 2017). It should,
however, be noted that other studies have shown no appreciable im-
provement with respect to AMS (Schlögl and Laaha, 2017; Marra et al.,
2018). In the case of RSD-based analyses, the problem of climatic
nonstationarity is expected to be negligible, due to the short time
spanned by the RSDs (Serinaldi and Kilsby, 2015); possible trends
cannot be captured using such short records, and the obtained quantiles
are representative of the current conditions. Nonstationarities could
however arise from the use of varying data elaboration procedures in
the creation of the RSD over time, potentially affecting the estimation of
the extreme value distribution parameters (Willems, 2000).
3.3. Lack of proper reference data and validation methods
As no direct measurement of high quantiles is available, validation
relies upon extrapolation from data recognized as reliable. Rain gauges
provide the natural data source, and RSD-derived quantiles are
benchmarked against gauge-derived quantiles obtained using standard
extreme value methods (see, for example, Overeem et al., 2009;
Eldardiry et al., 2015; Gado et al., 2017; Demirdjian et al., 2018;
McGraw et al., 2019). This approach disregards the scale mismatch
between RSDs and gauges (by six to nine orders of magnitude), which is
expected to translate into differences between the corresponding
quantiles (Tang et al., 2018). Additionally, RSDs generally provide
temporal snapshots of the rainfall fields. Contrary to the traditional
point measurements, these describe the state at a given instant and do
not provide temporal integrals (Villarini et al., 2008). This may lead to
different distributional properties, which should be taken into account.
A proper quantification of these effects is difficult due to the de-
pendence on spatial and temporal scales, geographical region, and
quantile of interest. When using short data records, the random com-
ponent of these mismatches is large enough that both over- and un-
derestimation are to be expected, even under ideal measurement con-
ditions for both RSDs and gauges (Peleg et al., 2018) (Fig. 1).
Systematic errors and temporal mismatch between RSD and gauge ex-
tremes also emerge from the use of different temporal resolutions to
calculate the precipitation pertaining to the duration of interest (Marra
and Morin, 2015), from the temporal sampling characterizing RSDs
(Villarini and Krajewski, 2010), or from temporal gaps in the data
F. Marra, et al.
pearing as regions with increased quantiles in the CMORPH estimates in (a). Interesting to note the sea-land interaction gradient, which is confirmed by both satellite
and weather radar analyses.
(Libertino et al., 2016).
4. Future research directions
Based on the knowledge gaps summarized above, we highlight fu-
ture research directions that, to our view, promise immediate im-
provement in our ability to exploit the information provided by RSDs:
(a) separation and quantification of the sources of uncertainty; (b) de-
velopment of statistical methods more suitable for RSDs; (c) improve-
ment of validation methods. In addition to these, the (d) explicit use of
the areal scale; and the (e) derivation of climatological insights re-
present natural directions to fully take advantage of the characteristics
of RSDs.
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Journal of Hydrology 574 (2019) 699–705
Fig. 2. Maps of the 20-year return period quan-
tiles of hourly precipitation derived (generalized
extreme value fit of the AMS, method of the
linear moments, at-site application) from (a)
high-resolution CMORPH (18-year record, Joyce
et al., 2004), and (b) weather radar archive (24-
year record, Marra and Morin, 2015). Remotely
sensed datasets can capture the climatic patterns
of extreme precipitation in the north-eastern
coasts of the Mediterranean (a), also confirmed
by the weather radar estimates in (c). Large
noise caused by the short data records is clearly
visible in all the maps, with an extreme impact
on the arid regions of north-eastern Africa (a).
Artefacts caused by the satellite retrieval algo-
rithms are also visible, such as the lakes, ap-
4.1. Separation and quantification of the sources of uncertainty
The impact of short record length, quantitative estimation accuracy,
spatial-temporal estimation scales, and temporal sampling on the ac-
curacy of frequency analyses derived from RSDs is currently being as-
sessed as a whole. A proper separation and quantification of their re-
lative contribution, an example of which is reported in Fig. 1, is still
lacking. Improved knowledge of this would allow research efforts to
take the most relevant directions, depending on the RSDs of interest
(spatial/temporal scales, record length, typical sources of estimation
error) and the objective (design, monitoring, climatology).
4.2. Development of statistical methods more suitable for remotely sensed
datasets
Automatic, data-driven regionalization methods (Hastie et al., 2009;
Fig. 3. Maps of the 100-year return period
quantiles of hourly precipitation for the con-
tiguous United States derived from the high-re-
solution CMORPH (18-year record, Joyce et al.,
2004) using different extreme value methods: (a)
generalized extreme value fit of the AMS
(method of the linear moments, at-site applica-
tion), and (b) metastatistical extreme value (at-
site application) as described in Marra et al.
(2018). Remotely sensed datasets can capture
the climatic patterns of extreme precipitation, as
illustrated by the enhancement of the Gulf of
Mexico coastline. Artefacts caused by the re-
trieval algorithms are also visible, such as the
lakes, appearing as regions with increased
quantiles in the CMORPH estimates, and the la-
titudinal bands around 36–37°N and 50°N. Large
noise caused by the short data records is clearly
visible in (a), while less noisy estimates are ob-
served in (b) owing to the reduced uncertainty
resulting from the metastatistical extreme value
approach.
F. Marra, et al.
Fig. 4. Graphical representation of the stochastic storm transposition method
(Wright et al., 2013). The method exploits relatively short catalogues of storms
observed over a predefined climatically homogeneous region to transpose their
occurrence stochastically. This allows the data sample to be increased artifi-
cially, providing improved estimates of desired high precipitation quantiles.
The figure shows the transposition of the June 27, 2006, storm in the Little
Sugar Creek at Archdale, United States. Reprinted from Wright et al. (2013).
Demirdjian et al., 2018) would help improve RSD-based analyses and
provide additional knowledge on the climatology of extremes world-
wide. The gridded geometry of RSDs potentially allows the formaliza-
tion of local regionalization frameworks, as drafted by Goudenhoofdt
et al. (2017), that can increase the accuracy of high-quantile estimates.
The interpretation of the obtained results would, however, require
adequate understanding and discussion (Panziera et al., 2016). The use
of stochastic storm transposition (Wright et al., 2013; Wright et al.,
2014; Wright et al., 2017) also promises great potential for areas
characterized by reasonable climatological homogeneity (Fig. 4). Ap-
proaches based on multiscaling theory for estimation of precipitation
extremes should also be further explored with RSDs (Langousis and
Veneziano, 2007; Van de Vyver, 2018).
In particular, the recently proposed metastatistical extreme value
(MEV) framework (Marani and Ignaccolo, 2015) is deemed highly
beneficial for reducing the issues related to parameter estimation and
climate sampling (Zorzetto et al., 2016; Zorzetto and Marani, 2019), as
shown in Fig. 3, and for its robustness to the estimation errors typical of
RSDs (Marra et al., 2018). The MEV methodology, based on ordinary
events rather than on small samples from the tail of the distributions,
allows to easily implement innovative methodologies for exploiting
spatial data (e.g., Bardossy and Pegram, 2018), accounting for extremes
arising from multiple underlying processes (Marra et al., 2019), and
exploring the climatology of extremes exploiting knowledge on the
ordinary events distributions. These features promise important im-
pacts on the overall quality of RSD-derived quantiles, on the potential
of RSD for the analysis of extreme precipitation climatology, and on the
methodological possibilities for evaluating RSD-based analyses.
4.3. Improvement of validation methods
After a decade of research, RSDs are still based on methods devel-
oped and tuned for gauge data—that is, for the point scale. Gauge data
are often assimilated into RSD-based analyses, either indirectly, in the
adjustment of RSDs, or directly, in quantile–quantile calibration of RSD
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Journal of Hydrology 574 (2019) 699–705
extremes. Possible alternative approaches include the explicit rescaling
of RSD-derived quantiles to the point scale using ARFs. Given the scale
mismatch, however, these procedures may introduce new sources of
error; the uncertainty related to the comparison of areal- and point-
scale extreme precipitation (Peleg et al., 2018; Fig. 1) calls for the de-
velopment of innovative ways to validate RSD-based analyses. Possible
solutions include the use of downscaling methods based on the corre-
lation structure of the precipitation fields to reconstruct the point-scale
information (Booij, 2002; Foufoula-Georgiou et al., 2014; Zorzetto and
Marani, 2019), or the use of dense gauge networks to provide improved
information at the areal scale of interest.
4.4. Explicit use of the areal scale
Methods enabling simultaneous consideration of the areal and
temporal dimensions of RSDs (Orem and Pelletier, 2016; Traxl et al.,
2016; Gao et al., 2017a) would improve our understanding of the
linkage between extreme precipitation and its effect on the hydrological
units of interest, with the potential to push forward our knowledge of
the interactions and relationships between precipitation and flood fre-
quency (Wright et al., 2014; Dis et al., 2016; Gao et al., 2017b). This
requires the objective identification of the hydro-meteorological spatial
and temporal scales relevant for the hydrological response of the
catchment of interest, which are potentially function of the precipita-
tion climatology of the area (e.g., Rinat et al., 2018). Inclusion of
spatial-temporal precipitation variability could add additional in-
formation, at the price, however, of increased model complexity.
4.5. Derivation of climatological insights
Comparison of analyses derived from different RSDs (Marra et al.,
2017) can help us isolate climatic signals from artifacts (Fig. 2), effec-
tively improving our knowledge of the spatial structure of extreme
precipitation over previously ungauged regions, both land and oceans
(Demirdjian et al., 2018). This information can be used to capture in-
tergauge gradients and draw improved maps of high quantiles for
complex climatology regions, as well as to explore different covariates
potentially influencing precipitation extremes, such as topography,
urban areas, and coast-land interaction.
5. Closing statement
This paper gave a focused overview of the recent research on pre-
cipitation frequency analyses based on remotely sensed precipitation
datasets. Such datasets derive areal-scale information with high spa-
tiotemporal resolution at the regional or (quasi-) global scale, over-
coming the spatial sampling limitations of rain gauges. Four main ob-
jectives are pursued using remotely sensed datasets: derivation of high
quantiles for design applications; monitoring and early warning of ex-
treme precipitation; temporal downscaling of extreme precipitation
from gauge data; and characterization of the climatology of extreme
precipitation. Three main issues affect the quantitative accuracy of
frequency analyses based on remotely sensed datasets: quantitative
inaccuracy of extreme precipitation estimates; inadequacy of the
adopted statistical methods caused by the availability of short data
records; and lack of proper reference data and validation methods.
Future research efforts should aim to separate and quantify the
sources of uncertainty affecting analyses based on remotely sensed
datasets, develop statistical methods to cope with the characteristics of
these datasets, and improve validation methods, considering the scale
mismatch between remotely sensed datasets and gauges. In addition to
these investigations, the explicit use of the areal dimension and the
investigation of climatological insights promise to improve our
knowledge of the characteristics of extreme precipitation at multiple
scales worldwide.
F. Marra, et al.
Declaration of interest
None.
Acknowledgements
This study was funded by the Israel Science Foundation [grant no.
1007/15], a National Science Foundation–Binational Science
Foundation grant [BSF 2016953], and the Eversource Energy Center at
the University of Connecticut. The authors thank Editor-in-Chief Dr.
Marco Borga for prompting the development of this focused review and,
together with the anonymous reviewer, helping improving the quality
of the manuscript.
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