PhD Student Isabel González Méndez leads new paper in AGU's journal, Earth and Space Science

Kudos and congratulations to Isabel González Méndez, who leads a new paper in the AGU journal Earth and Space Science - as many of you who work in the tropics or in mountain regions know, good precipitation data can be hard to come by.  Isabel took a deep dive into the primary gridded precipitation datasets for Central America, using the original meteorological data (which she painstakingly acquired from all the national meteorological services) to assess quality and potential biases in the derived products from leading research consortia.  She finds that the CHIRPS (https://www.nature.com/articles/sdata201566) performs best compared to the underlying weather station data, but even in CHIRPS (and other gridded products) there are indications of a bias in rainfall trends especially in eastern Honduras and Nicaragua.  Isabel’s careful and innovative approach here reminds us all of the importance of thinking about uncertainties and possible biases even in globally complete gridded data and provides guidance for how best to study climate change and variability in Central America. 

 

Thanks to coauthors SGDE alumna Talia Anderson, Diego Pons, and Irma Ayes Rivera.