ESTIMACIÓN DE DATOS TROPICALES FALTANTES DE CANTIDAD DE LLUVIA USANDO DATOS SATELITALES AJUSTADOS.

A state-of-the-art procedure aimed to estimate the frequent gaps of missed monthly and annual rainfall data items of tropical stations was designed and tested. For the gaps assessments the procedure included the adjustment by using a statistical parametric transference of the nearly continuous satellite monthly rainfall registers coming from the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) with the available discontinuous monthly rainfall data items of the station under consideration. The procedure was experimentally applied to the 216 monthly rain gauge values in mm measured with Hellman pluviometer from the station Karimao (Period 1998-2015) located at 12 km to the SE of Caracas (Venezuela), in the study area of Caracas near La Pereza reservoir. The TRMM data included 216 monthly original values in mm (1998- 2015) downloaded for this area from the Internet web page Giovanni maintained by NASA in the United States of America with minimum resolution of 120 km2. The original TRMM data have an overestimation of 30 %. After the adjustment of the original monthly TRMM data, the analysis of a random sample of 42 missing data gaps was simulated and this helped to calculate a large non-acceptable error of ±40 % but the annual values obtained with the whole TRMM monthly adjusted values produced a small acceptable error of ±11 %. Finally, even though a good result was obtained for the annual level, the recommendation is a careful use of satellite data to fill rain gauge data gaps in tropical areas. The original TRMM satellite was substituted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]