A Lévy-driven rainfall model with applications to futures pricing

Abstract

We propose a parsimonious stochastic model for characterising the distributional and temporal properties of rainfall. The model is based on an integrated Ornstein–Uhlenbeck process driven by the Hougaard Lévy process. We derive properties of this process and propose an extended model which generalises the Ornstein–Uhlenbeck process to the class of continuous-time ARMA processes. The model is illustrated by fitting it to empirical rainfall data on both daily and hourly time scales. It is shown that the model is sufficiently flexible to capture important features of the rainfall process across locations and time scales. Finally, we study an application to the pricing of rainfall derivatives which introduces the market price of risk via the Esscher transform. We first give a result specifying the risk-neutral expectation of a general moving average process. Then we illustrate the pricing method by calculating futures prices based on empirical daily rainfall data, where the rainfall process is specified by our model.