Generation of simulated rainfall data at different time-scales

Abstract

We desire to generate monthly rainfall totals for a particular location in such a way that the statistics for the simulated data match the statistics for the observed data. We are especially interested in the accumulated rainfall totals over several months. We propose two different ways to construct a joint rainfall probability distribution that matches the observed grade correlation coefficients and preserves the known marginal distributions. Both methods use multi-dimensional checkerboard copulas. In the first case we construct a copula of maximum entropy and in the second case we use a copula derived from a multi-variate normal distribution. Finally we simulate monthly rainfall totals at a particular location and compare the results.