Clustering of Precipitation Pattern in Indonesia Using TRMM Satellite Data

Abstract

This paper identifies the climatic regions in Indonesia based on the rainfall pattern similarity using TRMM data. Indonesia is a tropical climate region with three main climate clusters, i.e. monsoonal, anti-monsoonal and semi-monsoonal. The clusters were formed by examining rainfall observation datasets recorded at a number of stations over Indonesia with coarse spatial resolution. Clustering based on higher resolution datasets is needed to characterize the rainfall pattern over remote areas with no stations. TRMM provides a high resolution gridded dataset. A statistical test has been applied to evaluate the significance of TRMM bias, and it indicated that the TRMM based satellite precipitation product is a reasonable choice to be used as an input to cluster regions in Indonesia based on the similarity of rainfall patterns. The clustering by Euclidean distance revealed that Indonesia can be grouped into three significantly different rainfall patterns. Compared to the existing references, there have been regions where the rainfall pattern has been shifted. The results in this research thus update the previously defined climate regions in Indonesia.