Abstract

In Africa, there are only one-eighth as many meteorological stations as the World Meteorological Organization advises, creating a significant data gap on dozens of countries which are more susceptible to climate change. Although data from ground-based stations are often regarded as the benchmark for meteorological data, they do have some limitations. Confidence in the use of satellite-driven products for a variety of applications is expanding as a result of the growing corpus of research into the validation and evaluation of satellite driven products in diverse locations. Most researchers have shown that these products have more significant potential in diverse applications.
However, there is limited research in validating temperature-based satellite products as many studies have focused on satellite-driven precipitation products. This study compared the daily temperature records from 2001 to 2015 from the CHIRTS satellite and station-driven temperature network with temperature data records of at least 15 years duration from three locations in Ghana. To evaluate CHIRTS performance, the ground-based data were also contrasted with ERA 5 temperatures. On a daily and monthly basis, the CHIRTS estimates showed good agreement with the station data than on the annual levels. The CHIRTS estimates also outperformed the ERA 5 estimates at all levels of comparison. The study's conclusions indicate that the dataset from CHIRTS is an encouraging improvement to the category of satellite driven data sets that offer forecasts for a long-period and high-quality temperature data. In comparison to data from the stations, CHIRTS fared similarly to or better than ERA 5 records on many metrics.