ALBERT

Description: Understanding the precipitation variability and extreme precipitation over arid Central Asia (CA) has largely been hampered by the lack of daily precipitation observations. The gridded precipitation datasets over CA are large discrepancies. Here, three gauge-based gridded daily precipitation products from Asian Precipitation Highly-Resolved Observational Data Integration Towards Evaluation (APHRODITE), Global Precipitation Climatology Center (GPCC), and Climate Prediction Center Based Analysis of Global Daily Precipitation (CPC_global) were assessed and compared with 49 rain gauge daily observations precipitation (OBS) from January 1985 to December 2015 using different time-scales over CA and different climate regimes, specifically Northern CA with temperate continental climate (NCA), Southwestern CA with dry arid desert climate (SWCA), and Southeastern CA with Mediterranean continental climate (SECA). Four accuracy indices [correlation coefficient (R), Bias, root mean square error (RMSE), and relative bias (RBias)] were employed to evaluate the performance of the three products in depicting the spatiotemporal features of precipitation variation over CA at multiple time scales (including daily, monthly, seasonal, and yearly). The mean annual and daily precipitation of OBS and three gridded products exhibit the trend of a gradual precipitation decreased from SECA to NCA and SWCA. The best overall performance was obtained for APHRODITE and GPCC for daily and annual time-scale, whereas CPC shows noticeable underestimation precipitation in SECA. The monthly precipitation depicted distinct features with a bimodal pattern with a peak in March and another in December, include the SECA and SWCA regions. In contrast, precipitation was concentrated in summer with the peak in July over the NCA region. At monthly scale terms, APHRODITE was more accurate in the wet seasons (winter and spring months) in SWCA and SECA. Additionally, GPCC has fairly better capability in summer months in NCA. Considering the spatial distribution, the bias variability was largerly in mountainous areas than in the plains. Temporally, the bias largerly in the dry seasons than in the wet seasons. At the interannual variability scale, GPCC was capable of qualitatively increasing the CA (NCA and SECA) precipitation during the last 21 years, while APHRODITE underestimated the trends. The CPC overestimated the precipitation trends over all regions. This study can serve as a reference for selecting daily precipitation products with low densities of stations, complex topographies, and similar climatic regions.