Water Resources Research Act Program

Details for Project ID 2011FL273B

In-Filling Missing Daily Rain Gauge Data Using Radar Rainfall Data: Influence of Homogeneous Rain Areas

Institute: Florida
Year Established: 2011 Start Date: 2011-03-01 End Date: 2012-02-28
Total Federal Funds: $10,000 Total Non-Federal Funds: $20,500

Principal Investigators: Ramesh Teegavarapu

Abstract: Deterministic and stochastic spatial interpolation methods are generally used for infilling rainfall values at a gage based on values recorded at all other available recording gages or other sources. Radar (NEXRAD) data is now acknowledged as a viable source for infilling of missing rainfall records. Several issues that affect the infilling methods include: the historical rain gage and radar data, spatial and temporal variability of rainfall, radar-rain gage relationships, selection of spatial extent of radar data. The main objective of the proposed study is to develop several methods that would be used to in-fill the historical daily missing rain gauge data and evaluate the performance of these methods in homogeneous rainfall areas in south Florida region. This is an extension of on-going project to assess infilling methods. The models will be evaluated for performance in homogeneous rain areas and new performance measures will be developed for evaluation of methods. The developed methods would use NEXRAD rainfall data, for this purpose, and they will be applied to the existing available data and their performance would be evaluated and assessed. Upon successful development and verification of the models, the best model based on performance measure will be used in filling the missing daily rain data for rain gauge stations. The in-filling methods using NEXRAD data will also be compared with traditional methods that use rain gage data for infilling. Missing data at 268 rain gages in the SFWMD region will be in-filled using the best approach developed in the proposed research. The proposed research is highly relevant and critical to a number of water resources management agencies (e.g. South Florida Water Management District (SFWMD)) that currently use NEXRAD based rainfall data for modeling and management of day-to-day operations of water resources systems. The products derived from the proposed study are expected to be tested for real-time use of NEXRAD-based rainfall data by South Florida Water Management District.