Introduction of Global Gridded Precipitation Datasets

The lack of precipitation data has always been one of the major constraints on water engineering and climatology studies. Hence, researchers and engineers are always investigating alternatives to fill the gap of data scarcity for ungauged areas. Nowadays, one of the options for the researchers in this area is applying global gridded precipitation datasets. These datasets provide a gridded regional or global precipitation data by collecting data from various sources including gauges, remote sensing information, and numerical models. The first step to use the datasets is being aware of different sources of these datasets. The second step is to select the most suitable dataset for a given region. This selection is carried out by comparing the extracted precipitation data from different datasets with the existing gauged information. Given the necessity of using the global precipitation datasets, a brief description of the method of obtaining precipitation data in each dataset is presented in the current paper. Moreover, the characteristics of each database, including the spatial-temporal resolution, and time period of the information of databases has been explained.