A stochastic rainfall model that can reproduce important rainfall properties across the timescales from several minutes to a decade

Abstract

<p>We introduce a stochastic model reproducing various rainfall characteristics at timescales between 5 minutes and one decade. The model is composed of three moduels as follow: First, the model generates the fine-scale rainfall data based on a type of Bartlett-Lewis rectangular pulse model; Second, sequence of the generated rainstorms are shuffled so that their correlation structure can be preserved; Third, the time series is rearranged at the monthly timescale to reflect the coarse scale correlation structure. The method was tested based on the 69 years of 5-minute rainfall data of Bochum, Germany. The mean, variance, covariance, skewness, and proportion of wet/dry periods were well reproduced at the timescales from 5 minutes to a decade. The extreme values were also successfully reproduced at the timescales between 5 minutes and 3 days. The antecedent moisture condition before an extreme rainfall event was reproduced well too.</p>