V: Daily catchment rainfall estimated from meteosat

Abstract Meteosat data for 1986 to 1988 have been used to estimate the daily rainfall over catchments of tributaries of the river Senegal in Mail and Guinea. The technique uses the methodology of the TAMSAT group of the University of Reading, which involves the selection of an appropriate cloud top temperature threshold to determine whether the cloud is producing rain and the rainfall is estimated from the period during which storm clouds remain over a site. After calibration against all available raingauges in the catchments, the daily rainfall estimates derived by this technique were used as inputs to rainfall‐runoff models. The results indicate that the streamflow models, which had themselves been calibrated using raingauge data, performed as well or better when the satellite derived estimates were used as inputs than when gauge data were used. An economical, automated operational system is described.