Bias adjustment of satellite rainfall data through stochastic modeling: Methods development and application to Nepal

We apply the method to adjust the distributions of daily rainfall observed by the TRMM satellite in Nepal, which exemplifies the challenges associated with a sparse gauge network and large biases due to complex topography. In a cross-validation analysis on daily rainfall from TRMM 3B42 v6, we find that using a small subset of the available gauges, the proposed method outperforms local rainfall estimations using the complete network of available gauges to directly interpolate local rainfall or correct TRMM by adjusting monthly means. We conclude that the proposed frequency-domain bias correction approach is robust and reliable compared to other bias correction approaches.