Abstract
A stochastic rainfall model is presented for the generation of hourly rainfall data in an urban area in Malaysia. In view of the high temporal and spatial variability of rainfall within the tropical rain belt, the Spatial–Temporal Neyman–Scott Rectangular Pulse model was used. The model, which is governed by the Neyman–Scott process, employs a reasonable number of parameters to represent the physical attributes of rainfall. A common approach is to attach each attribute to a mathematical distribution. With respect to rain cell intensity, this study proposes the use of a mixed exponential distribution. The performance of the proposed model was compared to a model that employs the Weibull distribution. Hourly and daily rainfall data from four stations in the Damansara River basin in Malaysia were used as input to the models, and simulations of hourly series were performed for an independent site within the basin. The performance of the models was assessed based on how closely the statistical characteristics of the simulated series resembled the statistics of the observed series. The findings obtained based on graphical representation revealed that the statistical characteristics of the simulated series for both models compared reasonably well with the observed series. However, a further assessment using the AIC, BIC and RMSE showed that the proposed model yields better results. The results of this study indicate that for tropical climates, the proposed model, using a mixed exponential distribution, is the best choice for generation of synthetic data for ungauged sites or for sites with insufficient data within the limit of the fitted region.
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Acknowledgments
This study was sponsored by the Ministry of Higher Education, under Geran Universiti Penyelidikan vote 09J48. The authors thank the Department of Irrigation and the Drainage of Malaysia for furnishing the data used. The authors also gratefully acknowledged the support and cooperation of the Research Management Unit of Universiti Teknologi Malaysia.
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Abas, N., Daud, Z.M. & Yusof, F. A comparative study of mixed exponential and Weibull distributions in a stochastic model replicating a tropical rainfall process. Theor Appl Climatol 118, 597–607 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00704-013-1060-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00704-013-1060-4