Capability of GPM IMERG Products for Extreme Precipitation Analysis over the Indonesian Maritime Continent

Integrated Multi-satellite Retrievals for GPM (IMERG) data have been widely used to analyze extreme precipitation, but the data have never been validated for the Indonesian Maritime Continent (IMC). This study evaluated the capability of IMERG Early (E), Late (L), and Final (F) data to observe extreme rain in the IMC using the rain gauge data within five years (2016–2020). The capability of IMERG in the observation of the extreme rain index was evaluated using Kling–Gupta efficiency (KGE) matrices. The IMERG well captured climatologic characteristics of the index of annual total precipitation (PRCPTOT), number of wet days (R85p), number of very wet days (R95p), number of rainy days (R1mm), number of heavy rain days (R10mm), number of very heavy rain days (R20mm), consecutive dry days (CDD), and max 5-day precipitation (RX5day), indicated by KGE value >0.4. Moderate performance (KGE = 0–0.4) was shown in the index of the amount of very extremely wet days (R99p), the number of extremely heavy precipitation days (R50mm), max 1-day precipitation (RX1day), and Simple Daily Intensity Index (SDII). Furthermore, low performance of IMERG (KGE < 0) was observed in the consecutive wet days (CWDs) index. Of the 13 extreme rain indices evaluated, IMERG underestimated and overestimated precipitation of nine and four indexes, respectively. IMERG tends to overestimate precipitation of indexes related to low rainfall intensity (e.g., R1mm). The highest overestimation was observed in the CWD index, related to the overestimation of light rainfall and the high false alarm ratio (FAR) from the daily data. For all indices of extreme rain, IMERG showed good capability to observe extreme rain variability in the IMC. Overall, IMERG-L showed a better capability than IMERG-E and-F but with an insignificant difference. Thus, the data of IMERG-E and IMERG-L, with a more rapid latency than IMERG-F, have great potential to be used for extreme rain observation and flood modeling in the IMC.