The NRL-Blend High Resolution Precipitation Product and its Application to Land Surface Hydrology

In this chapter, we discuss the basic workings of the NRL-Blend high-resolution precipitation product, followed by a validation experiment. We employ satellite omissions to the existing (late 2008) constellation of low Earth orbiting satellite platforms to examine the impact of several proxy Global Precipitation Mission (GPM) satellite constellation configurations when used to initialize land surface models (LSM). The emphasis is on how high resolution precipitation products such as the NRL-Blend are affected by such factors as sensor type (conical or across-track scanning) and nodal crossing time, using a collection of GPM proxy datasets gathered over the continental United States. We present results which examine how soil moisture states simulated by the two state-of-the-art land surface models are impacted when forced with the various precipitation datasets, each corresponding to a different proxy GPM constellation configuration.