PROGRAM: 3-4

Title:

APHRODITE-2 ACTIVITIES: FOR BETTER PRESENTATION OF EXTREME RAINFALL EVENTS
A Yatagai1, N Yasutomi2*, S Tanaka2, K Tanaka2 and A Higuchi3, K Toyoshima3
1Dept of Science and Engineering, Hirosaki University, Bunkyo-cho, Hirosaki, 0368561 Aomori, Japan
*2Disastar Prevention Research Institute, Kyoto University, Gokasho, Uji, 6110011 Kyoto, Japan
3Center for Environmental Remote Sensing, Chiba University, Yayoi-cho, Inage, Chiba, 2638522, Chiba, Japan

Abstract:

The Asian Precipitation -- Highly Resolved Observational Data Integration Towards Evaluation of Water Resources (APHRODITE) project (Yatagai et al., 2009, 2011a, 2011b) is an international cooperative program collecting and analyzing daily rain gauge observations from thousands of Asian stations in addition to those reported to WMO Global Telecommunication System (GTS), creating 57 year (1950-2007) daily precipitation dataset. It is open to public at APHRODITE website (http://st.hirosaki-u.ac.jp/~aphrodite2/english.

APHRODITE started its feasibility study from 2005, and in the following 5 years, international collaboration, data publishing, capacity building and many research activities had been carried out. APHRODITE datasets are widely used for climate analysis, model evaluation, extreme events analyses, and many other purposes.

Since the frequency of extremely heavy rainfall and drought events is increasing in this decade, APHRODITE data are expected to be used in the evaluation of these extreme events. However, current APHRODITE products need improvement in terms of different “end-of-day” time of observational data used in grid analysis for the better presentation of extreme events. APHRODITE-2 starts in 2016, utilizing data from geostationary meteorological satellites, and rain-fall radars, by statistical technique, we apply a time adjustment within APHRODITE-2 to develop new products.

APHRODITE-2 makes effort of capacity building for the Asian National Hydro-Meteorological services (NHMs). The APHRODITE-2 workshop will be held on September 11-14, 2017, at Chiba University. Expected participants are young staff members of NHMs and researchers. In the workshop, we will provide the participants with the opportunity for acquiring skills of quality control and gridding analyses through using exactable programs of APHRODITE. Over 100 people from 19 countries apply and 25 will participate in the workshop. The participants will be asked to bring rain gauge data of their countries to the workshop so as to apply their skills to NHMs operations. The rain gauge data brought by participants to the workshop will be permitted us to use them in our new products. Since good research collaboration with Department of Hydrometeorology of Nepal are kept from the era of APHRIDTE1 and 15 or more staff members there will participate in the APHRODITE-2 workshop, an additional workshop will be held in Kathmandu in November 2017. In the workshop, following program is planned,

  • Data handling and conversion (for gridding analyses)
  • Quality control (explanation, checking data and feedback from the participants)
  • Gridding analyses using AphroSystem (provide 0.05-degree grid product for each participant’s country).
We will report the progress of the workshop.

Acknowledgements:

APHRODITE’s water resources project was supported by the Environmental Research and Technology Development Fund, Ministry of Environment, Japan (B062, A0601 and 2-1602). Part of this work is supported by Grants-In-Aid for Scientific Research (15K05291) from JSPS.

References:

Yatagai, A., A. Kitoh, K. Kamiguchi, O. Arakawa, N. Yasutomi and A. Hamada (2011) APHRODITE: Constructing a Long-term Daily Gridded Precipitation Dataset for Asia Based on a Dense Network of Rain Gauges, Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, doi:10.1175/BAMS-D-11-00122.1.

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