Disaggregation of spatial rainfall fields for hydrological modelling.docVIP

Hydrology and Earth System Sciences, 5(2), 165–173 (2001)Disaggregation? EGS of spatial rainfall fields for hydroloigcal modelling Disaggregation of spatial rainfall fields for hydrological modelling N.G. Mackay , R.E. Chandler , C. Onof and H.S. Wheater 1 2 1* 1 1 Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, London SW7 2BU University College London, Department of Statistical Science, London WC1E 6BT 2 *Email for corresponding author: c.onof@ic.ac.uk ABSTRACT Meteorological models generate fields of precipitation and other climatological variables as spatial averages at the scale of the grid used for numerical solution. The grid-scale can be large, particularly for GCMs, and disaggregation is required, for example to generate appropriate spatial-temporal properties of rainfall for coupling with surface-boundary conditions or more general hydrological applications. A method is presented here which considers the generation of the wet areas and the simulation of rainfall intensities separately. For the first task, a nearest-neighbour Markov scheme, based upon a Bayesian technique used in image processing, is implemented so as to preserve the structural features of the observed rainfall. Essentially, the large-scale field and the previously disaggregated field are used as evidence in an iterative procedure which aims at selecting a realisation according to the joint posterior probability distribution. In the second task the morphological characteristics of the field of rainfall intensities are reproduced through a random sampling of intensities according to a beta distribution and their allocation to pixels chosen so that the hig