An effective high resolution rainfall estimation based on spatiotemporal modeling

Abstract

High resolution rainfall estimation is one of the most significant input for numerous meteorological applications, such as agricultural irrigation, water power generation, and flood warning. However, rainfall estimation is a challenging task because it subjects to various sources of errors. In this paper, an effective high resolution rainfall estimation system is presented which employs a spatiotemporal model named RANLIST. The merits of this system are listed as follows: (1) RANLIST, which exploits both spatial structure of multiple radar reflectivity factors and time-series information of rain processes, is superior to other methods for rainfall estimation. (2) RANLIST is used for rainfall estimation with temporal resolution of six minutes, while this system can estimate rainfall every minute which will do more help for coping with emergencies such as flood. Experiments have been implemented over radar-covered areas of Quanzhou and Hangzhou of China in June and July, 2014. Results show that the presented rainfall estimation system can obtain good performance with spatial resolution of 1 km × 1 km, temporal resolution of six minutes or one minutes.