On the determination of the speed of moving rainfall patterns

Abstract

The speed and direction of movement of rainfall patterns can be derived from data sets comprised of the coordinates (x, y) of a number of rainfall recording stations and the times of arrival (T) of some prominent feature of the recorded hyetographs. The problem may be interpreted geometrically as the determination of the equation of an inclined plane in the x, y, t space, so that it best represents the set of data points. The speed of movement is given by the inverse of the maximum slope of the plane and its direction is parallel to that of the maximum slope. The proposed method is based on minimizing the sum of the squared deviations between the observed arrival times (T) and values (t) computed by the equation of the inclined plane. © 1987 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.