Assessing the Impacts of Errors in Coarse Scale Data on the Performance of Spatial Downscaling: An Experiment with Synthetic Satellite Precipitation Products

The performance of spatial downscaling models depends on the quality of input coarse scale products. Thus, the impact of intrinsic errors contained in coarse scale satellite products on predictive performance should be properly assessed in parallel with the development of advanced downscaling models. Such an assessment is the main objective of this paper. Based on a synthetic satellite precipitation product at a coarse scale generated from rain gauge data, two synthetic precipitation products with different amounts of error were generated and used as inputs for spatial downscaling. Geographically weighted regression, which typically has very high explanatory power, was selected as the trend component estimation model, and area-to-point kriging was applied for residual correction in the spatial downscaling experiment. When errors in the coarse scale product were greater, the trend component estimates were much more susceptible to errors. But residual correction could reduce the impact of the erroneous trend component estimates, which improved the predictive performance. However, residual correction could not improve predictive performance significantly when substantial errors were contained in the input coarse scale data. Therefore, the development of advanced spatial downscaling models should be focused on correction of intrinsic errors in the coarse scale satellite product if a priori error information could be available, rather than on the application of advanced regression models with high explanatory power.