Precipitation trend uncertainty from product choice rivals or exceeds the magnitude of actual trends
Abstract
Gridded precipitation products are widely used to assess long-term rainfall and snowfall change, yet their trend reliability remains uncertain. We evaluate 19 (quasi-)global products for three annual statistics: mean precipitation, daily maximum, and wet-day frequency, screening for temporal homogeneity and benchmarking trends against daily and monthly rain-gauge observations. Most products exhibit spatially coherent discontinuities linked to observing-system changes, particularly satellite-instrument transitions in the late 1990s to early 2000s and 2014–2015. Notably, only 58–64% of non-gauge-corrected products match the reference trend sign on average. Even including gauge-corrected products, the interquartile range of product trends is 1.1–1.9 times the reference magnitude, so product choice rivals or exceeds the magnitude of the trends themselves. For 1983–2025 annual-mean trends over land, the eight long-record products span and extend beyond the climate model ensemble envelope, implying observations cannot cleanly disentangle model error from observational uncertainty. This uncertainty propagates into infrastructure design, agricultural risk management, and climate finance, particularly in the tropics and Global South.
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BibTeX
@article{zhu2026precipitation,
title = {{Precipitation trend uncertainty from product choice rivals or exceeds the magnitude of actual trends}},
author = {Shengli Zhu and Yoshihide Wada and Diego G. Miralles and Yongqiang Zhang and Chiyuan Miao and Hamza Kunhu Bangalath and Xuetong Wang and Hylke E. Beck},
journal = {Communications Earth \& Environment},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.1038/s43247-026-04148-w},
url = {https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-026-04148-w},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - JOUR
TI - Precipitation trend uncertainty from product choice rivals or exceeds the magnitude of actual trends
AU - Shengli Zhu
AU - Yoshihide Wada
AU - Diego G. Miralles
AU - Yongqiang Zhang
AU - Chiyuan Miao
AU - Hamza Kunhu Bangalath
AU - Xuetong Wang
AU - Hylke E. Beck
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/27
JO - Communications Earth & Environment
DO - 10.1038/s43247-026-04148-w
UR - https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-026-04148-w
AB - Gridded precipitation products are widely used to assess long-term rainfall and snowfall change, yet their trend reliability remains uncertain. We evaluate 19 (quasi-)global products for three annual statistics: mean precipitation, daily maximum, and wet-day frequency, screening for temporal homogeneity and benchmarking trends against daily and monthly rain-gauge observations. Most products exhibit spatially coherent discontinuities linked to observing-system changes, particularly satellite-instrument transitions in the late 1990s to early 2000s and 2014–2015. Notably, only 58–64% of non-gauge-corrected products match the reference trend sign on average. Even including gauge-corrected products, the interquartile range of product trends is 1.1–1.9 times the reference magnitude, so product choice rivals or exceeds the magnitude of the trends themselves. For 1983–2025 annual-mean trends over land, the eight long-record products span and extend beyond the climate model ensemble envelope, implying observations cannot cleanly disentangle model error from observational uncertainty. This uncertainty propagates into infrastructure design, agricultural risk management, and climate finance, particularly in the tropics and Global South.
SN - 2662-4435
ER -