Simulation of rainfall time series from different climatic regions using the direct sampling technique

Abstract

The direct sampling technique, belonging to the family of multiple-point statistics, is proposed as a nonparametric alternative to the classical autoregressive and Markov-chain-based models for daily rainfall time-series simulation. The algorithm makes use of the patterns contained inside the training image (the past rainfall record) to reproduce the complexity of the signal without inferring its prior statistical model: the time series is simulated by sampling the training data set where a sufficiently similar neighborhood exists. The advantage of this approach is the capability of simulating complex statistical relations by respecting the similarity of the patterns at different scales. The technique is applied to daily rainfall records from different climate settings, using a standard setup and without performing any optimization of the parameters. The results show that the overall statistics as well as the dry/wet spells patterns are simulated accurately. Also the extremes at the higher temporal scale are reproduced adequately, reducing the well known problem of overdispersion. © Author(s) 2014.