On Stochastic Characterization of Temporal Storm Patterns

Abstract

The present study, a continuation of a previous work by the author, suggests a new theoretical approach to the characterization of the temporal pattern of storms. A storm is defined as a continuous run of non-zero one-hour rainfall depths. A general stochastic model is developed to determine the probability distributions of cumulative storm rainfall amounts at successive time intervals after the storm began. The previous model for characterizing storm temporal patterns was based on the assumption that hourly rainfall depths were independent and identically exponentially distributed random variables, while sequences of wet hours were modeled by a first-order stationary Markov chain. Hence, the model did only introduce dependence of wet hour occurences into the rainfall process through the first-order Markov chain. The present paper proposes a more general model that can take into account both the persistence in hourly rainfall occurrences and the dependence between successive hourly rainfall depths. Results of an illustrative example show that by accounting for the correlation structure of consecutive rainfall depths the present model gives a better fit to the observations than the previous one.