A gentle reminder to those of you in climate/food sec and early warning that satellite rainfall products are NOT interoperable. I compared 2 of the most commonly used rainfall products over Mali for the same period and you can see a pretty huge difference.
Rainfall data are not interoperable and they are not created equal. If you’re going to use satellite-derived rainfall- don’t mix and match data sources. Also, try to use some kind of ground data to test for accuracy in your area of interest.
The product on the left ARC2, is available in daily images. I combined the daily images to make dekadal totals, which I then compared against RFE2’s daily images. This particular dekad seemed to have a lot of errors in the RFE2 datasets (many pixels recording over 700mm) but i found pretty stark differences between both datasets in all dekads. Of the two datasets, RFE2 was the most error-prone. That said, both datasets did not accurately reflect the pixel-level values of ground station data I used in comparison.
Of the two, I would recommend ARC2 as a more stable datasource for the Sahel.
Data Sources:
ARC2 (FTP)