10.6084/m9.figshare.3409282.v2
Bree Bennett
Bree
Bennett
Mark Thyer
Mark
Thyer
Michael Leonard
Michael
Leonard
Martin Lambert
Martin
Lambert
Bryson Bates
Bryson
Bates
Parsimonious Simulation of Daily Rainfall Fields
The University of Adelaide
2016
Stochastic Rainfall
Spaital Rainfall
Hydrology
2016-06-02 00:27:17
Conference contribution
https://adelaide.figshare.com/articles/conference_contribution/Parsimonious_Simulation_of_Daily_Rainfall_Fields/3409282
<p>The spatial distribution of rainfall has a significant
influence on catchment dynamics and streamflow generation. However, there are
few stochastic models that can simulate long sequences of stochastic rainfall
fields continuously in time and space. To address this issue, this paper
presents a continuous daily spatial rainfall model which employs a latent
variable approach. The use of a latent variable approach is parsimonious as it
utilises a single distribution to model both the rainfall occurrence and the
amount. A comprehensive evaluation approach was developed that uses a
performance classification scheme to systematically evaluate model performance
over a range of temporal and spatial scales. The evaluation of the model
performance using the Onkaparinga catchment in South Australia showed that the
model is able to reproduce the majority of statistics at individual sites
within the region as well as realistic patterns of spatial rain fields. These
statistics included rainfall occurrences/amounts, wet/dry spell distributions,
monthly/annual volumes, extremes and spatial patterns, which are important from
a hydrological standpoint. One of the few model weaknesses was that the total
annual rainfall in drier years (lower 5%) was over-estimated by 15% on average
over all sites. An advantage of the comprehensive evaluation was that it was
able to attribute the source of this over-estimation to the poor representation
of annual variability in rainfall occurrences. Given the strengths of this
continuous daily rainfall field model it shows considerable promise for
hydrological applications such as distributed catchment modelling.</p>