Assessing spatially dependent errors in radar rainfall estimates for rainfall-runoff simulation

Abstract

Weather radar been widely employed to measure precipitation and to predict flood risks. However, it is still not considered accurate enough because of radar errors. Most previous studies have focused primarily on removing errors from the radar data. Therefore, in the current study, we examined the effects of radar rainfall errors on rainfall-runoff simulation using the spatial error model (SEM). SEM was used to synthetically generate random or cross-correlated errors. A number of events were generated to investigate the effect of spatially dependent errors in radar rainfall estimates on runoff simulation. For runoff simulation, the Nam River basin in South Korea was used with the distributed rainfall-runoff model, Vflo™. The results indicated that spatially dependent errors caused much higher variations in peak discharge than independent random errors. To further investigate the effect of the magnitude of cross-correlation among radar errors, different magnitudes of spatial cross-correlations were employed during the rainfall-runoff simulation. The results demonstrated that a stronger correlation led to a higher variation in peak discharge up to the observed correlation structure while a correlation stronger than the observed case resulted in lower variability in peak discharge. We concluded that the error structure in radar rainfall estimates significantly affects predictions of the runoff peak. Therefore, efforts to not only remove the radar rainfall errors, but to also weaken the cross-correlation structure of the errors need to be taken to forecast flood events accurately.