A GIS-Based Methodology to Combine Rain Gauge and Radar Rainfall Estimates of Precipitation Using the Conditional Merging Technique for High-Resolution Quantitative Precipitation Forecasts in Țibleș and Rodnei Mountains

Abstract

Rain gauges provide accurate rainfall amount data; however, the interpolation of their data is difficult, especially because of the high spatial and temporal variability. On the other hand, a high-resolution type of information is highly required in hydrological modeling for discharge calculations in small catchments. This problem is partially solved by meteorological radars, which provide precipitation data with high spatial and temporal distributions over large areas. The purpose of this study is to validate a conditional merging technique (CMT) for 15 rainfall events that occurred on the southern slope of the Tibleș and Rodnei Mountains (Northern Romania). A Geographic Information System (GIS) methodology, based on three interpolation techniques—simple kriging, ordinary kriging, and cokriging—were utilized to derive continuous precipitation fields based on discrete rain gauge precipitation data and to derive interpolated radar data at rain gauge locations, and spatial analysis tools were developed to extract and analyze the optimal information content from both radar data and measurements. The dataset contains rainfall events that occurred in the period of 2015–2018, having 24 h temporal resolution. The model performance accuracy was carried out by using three validation metrics: mean bias error (MBE), mean absolute error (MAE), and root mean square error (RMSE). The validation stage showed that our model, based on conditional merging technique, performed very well in 11 out of 15 rainfall events (approximate 78%), with an MAE under 0.4 mm and RMSE under 0.7 mm.