Spatiotemporal Interpolation of Rainfall by Combining BME Theory and Satellite Rainfall Estimates

Atmosphere

Tingting Shi³  Xiaomei Yang³  George Christakos²  Jinfeng Wang³  Li Liu¹ 

[1] China Centre for Resources Satellite Data and Application, Beijing 100094, China; E-Mail:;Institute of Islands and Coastal Ecosystems, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou 310058, China; E-Mail:;State Key Laboratory of Resources and Environmental Information System, Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research, CAS, Beijing 100101, China; E-Mails:

关键词: Bayesian maximum entropy (BME);    TRMM;    spatiotemporal analysis;    soft data;    rainfall/precipitation;   

DOI  :  10.3390/atmos6091307

来源: mdpi

【 摘 要 】

The accurate assessment of spatiotemporal rainfall variability is a crucial and challenging task in many hydrological applications, mainly due to the lack of a sufficient number of rain gauges. The purpose of the present study is to investigate the spatiotemporal variations of annual and monthly rainfall over Fujian province in China by combining the Bayesian maximum entropy (BME) method and satellite rainfall estimates. Specifically, based on annual and monthly rainfall data at 20 meteorological stations from 2000 to 2012, (1) the BME method with Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) estimates considered as soft data, (2) ordinary kriging (OK) and (3) cokriging (CK) were employed to model the spatiotemporal variations of rainfall in Fujian province. Subsequently, the performance of these methods was evaluated using cross-validation statistics. The results demonstrated that BME with TRMM as soft data (BME-TRMM) performed better than the other two methods, generating rainfall maps that represented the local rainfall disparities in a more realistic manner. Of the three interpolation (mapping) methods, the mean absolute error (MAE) and root mean square error (RMSE) values of the BME-TRMM method were the smallest. In conclusion, the BME-TRMM method improved spatiotemporal rainfall modeling and mapping by integrating hard data and soft information. Lastly, the study identified new opportunities concerning the application of TRMM rainfall estimates.

【 授权许可】

CC BY   
© 2015 by the authors; licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.