Incorporating Information from a Digital Elevation Model for Improving the Areal Estimation of Rainfall

Abstract

Rainfall areal estimation is a common problem that appears in many fields such as meteorology, hydrology or agronomy. Rainfall is an intermittent phenomenon in both space and time and it displays large spatio- temporal variability. Raingage networks collect point estimates of rainfall that can be spatially interpolated to provide an estimate of the rain spatial distribution within a catchment area. In general, these interpolations provide good estimates of the total amount of rainfall but they do not model accurately its complex spatio-temporal structure.