Assimilation of precipitation Estimates from the Integrated Multisatellite Retrievals for GPM (IMERG, early Run) in the Canadian Precipitation Analysis (CaPA)

Results show that IMERG improves the ETS and FBI for all regions, with the Central and Prairie regions showing the most improvements over the benchmark. In these two regions, statistically significant improvements in ETS are obtained for all precipitation thresholds considered. In order to assess the value of IMERG in more remote areas that are nonetheless important for water resources management in Canada, a fifth zone that has a lower gauge density was considered. In this region, ETS was significantly improved for precipitation thresholds up to 10-mm/6-h. We believe that combining satellite information with other remotely sensed product such as radar will provide a significant increase in skill, especially for mountainous regions where there can be beam blockages that can affect the quality of radar data.