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Gridded data as a source of missing data replacement in station records

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Abstract

The quality of available station data over western Himalayan region (WHR) of India is poor due to missing values, and hence quantifying climate change information at the station level is more challenging. The present study investigated the extent to which the available two different resolutions gridded rainfall data from the India Meteorological Department (IMD) namely, IMD-\(0.25{^{\circ }}\times 0.25{^{\circ }}\) (IMD.25) and IMD-\(1{^{\circ }}\times 1{^{\circ }}\) (IMD1) and global observational gridded data from the Climate Research Unit (CRU-\(0.5{^{\circ }}\times 0.5{^{\circ }}\)) of UK can be used as a substitute to replace the missing values in IMD station data. Long-term time series produced at each station location showed that IMD.25 data was much closer to observation both in magnitude and patterns compared to CRU and IMD1. The seasonal and annual scale performance of these gridded data has been evaluated through different agreement and error indices. The agreement indices showed higher values in case of IMD.25 data while IMD1 and CRU indicated poor results. Similarly, the estimated errors are minimum in IMD.25 and maximum in CRU data. Finally, an overall agreement index (OAI) was developed by the combined influence of all the agreement indices. The results of OAI for each station revealed that in more than 77% of cases, the performance of IMD.25 gridded data to reproduce station level rainfall is superior as compared to IMD1 (<63%) and CRU (<46%) data. Therefore, it is concluded that the IMD.25 gridded data may be reliably used as a substitute data source in place of missing rain-gauge data over the WHR.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to acknowledge the Norway Research Council and Norwegian Water Resources and Energy Directorate for their funding assistance through the Indo-Norway international research project ‘INDICE’. The National Climate Centre (NCC) of Indian Meteorological Department (IMD), Pune and Climate Research Unit (CRU), UK, are also acknowledged for making data available for this study. The help provided by Dr D S Pai, IMD, in the course of this work is also acknowledged. The constructive suggestions provided by two anonymous reviewers to improve the quality of the paper have been highly appreciated.

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  1. Department of Agricultural Meteorology and Physics, Bidhan Chandra Krishi Viswavidyalaya (BCKV), Mohanpur, Nadia, West Bengal, 741 252, India

    Jitendra Kumar Meher & Lalu Das

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  1. Jitendra Kumar Meher
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  2. Lalu Das
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Correspondence to Lalu Das.

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Corresponding editor: A K Sahai

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Meher, J.K., Das, L. Gridded data as a source of missing data replacement in station records. J Earth Syst Sci 128, 58 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12040-019-1079-8

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