Combining Use of TRMM and Ground Observations of Annual Precipitations for Meteorological Drought Trends Monitoring in Morocco

The monitoring of drought statewide is a difficult issue especially when the national network of meteorological stations is sparse or do not cover the entire country. In this paper, rainfall satellite estimates derived from Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) product have been used to evaluate the ability of remote sensing data to study the trends of annual precipitation in Morocco between 1998 and 2012. The standardized precipitation index, SPI, has been chosen to monitor meteorological drought in Morocco. Firstly, the accuracy of TRMM product to estimate annual rainfall was evaluated. Annual precipitations derived from 5113 daily TRMM data were compared to the corresponding rainfall measurements from 23 rain gauges. The results showed a general good linear relationship between TRMM and rain gauges data. When considering annual record, the Pearson correlation coefficient, R², was equal to 0.73 and the root mean square error, RMSE, was equal to 159.8mm/year. The correlation between rain gauge measurements and TRMM rainfall had been clearly improved when working with long-term annual average precipitation. The R² increased to 0.79 and the RMSE decreased to 115,2mm. Secondly, the Mann-kendall tau coefficient, the Theil Sen slope and the contextual Mann-Kendall significance were used to analyze the SPI trends over Morocco. This analysis showed that mainly two regions appeared to be subject of significant trends during the studied period: The extreme north eastern of Morocco manifests a positive SPI trends and is more and more subject of extreme rainfall while the extreme south of the country is suffering from a decrease of annual precipitation which could represent significant socio-economic risks in these areas.