Optimal distance exponent of inverse distance method

Abstract

We calculated the optimal exponent values based on the hourly rainfall data observed in South Korea by treating the exponent value as a variable without fixing it as a square in the inverse distance method. For this purpose, rainfall observation stations providing the data are classified into four groups which are located at the Han river upstream, downstream, the Geum river upstream, and the Nakdong river midstream area. A total of 52 cases were analyzed for seven stations in each group. The optimal exponent value of distance was calculated in a case including one base station and four surrounding stations in a group. We applied the golden section search method to calculating this optimum values using rainfall data for 10 years (2004~2013) and verified the optimum values for the last three years (2014~2016). We compared and analyzed two results of the conventional inverse distance method and the inverse distance method in this study. The optimal values of distance exponent obtained in this study were 3.280, 1.839, 2.181, and 2.005 respectively, in the four groups, and totally mean value was 2.326. It is shown the proposed inverse distance method applying the optimal exponent is superior to the conventional inverse distance method.