Performance evaluation of satellite-based rainfall estimation across climatic zones in Burkina Faso

Satellite-based rainfall estimates are a good and cost-effective alternative to low-density rain gauges because they provide information for these areas. In this study, the accuracy of seven satellite-based precipitation datasets SPDs (TRMM-3B42v7, CHIRPSv2, RFEv2, ARC2, PERSIANN-CDR, GPCPv3.1, and TAMSATv3.1) was evaluated against ground-based observations. The performance of these datasets was evaluated at daily, dekadal, and monthly time scales from 2001 to 2014 using continuous and categorical statistical indicators. The results showed that CHIRPS and TAMSAT slightly underestimate precipitation in the Sahelian and Sudano–Sahelian zones by 2.1 to 8.3%, while the other datasets overestimate by between 3.7 and 13.2%. In the Sudanian zone, they all underestimated rainfall by 1.8 to 9.4%, except for GPCP and PERSIANN-CDR, which slightly overestimated rainfall in the range of 1.7 to 4.9%. The best performance was attributed to TAMSAT on the daily scale, while GPCP showed the weakest performance. CHIRPS dataset demonstrated the most accurate estimate of ground precipitation across all zones on the dekadal time scale, whereas TAMSAT showed unsatisfactory performance. On the monthly scale, CHIRPS again exhibits strong performance in the Sahelian and Sudano–Sahelian zones, ahead of TRMM-3B42. In the southernmost area, PERSIANN-CDR consistently exhibits good agreement with ground rainfall. In contrast to the results for the Sahelian and Sudano–Sahelian zones, larger errors were found for all SPDs within the Sudanian zone. The results suggest that the TAMSAT and CHIRPS datasets appear to be a good alternative source of information to rain gauge data. Therefore, these datasets could be valuable for different stakeholders such as meteorologists, hydrologists, and agronomists in Burkina Faso and support operational applications