Space-time variogram for daily rainfall estimates using rain gauges and satellite data in mountainous tropical Island of Bali, Indonesia (Preliminary Study)

Abstract

High spatio-temporal variability of daily rainfall in Bali Island can create the absence of structure in the daily variogram in certain days. This research proposes a new technique applying space–time variogram for 3-successive daily rainfall to detect structure in variogram estimation by merging rain gauges and satellite data applying ordinary kriging (OK), regression kriging with CMORPH (CM), regression kriging with TRMM (TR), and blended monthly rainfall (MONT) to obtain daily blended gridded rainfall estimates. Original retrieval of CMORPH (CM_OR) and TRMM (TR_OR) also used as control points to assess the proposed method. Uncertainty and sensitivity analysis including cross validation were carried out to validate the proposed method.The result shows that a new technique, adapted from CMORPH specific character, can be applied to detect the existence of structure in variogram. Blended gridded daily rainfall estimates of CM has highest probability detection of rainy events, while OK the lowest. Generally, the four interpolation methods (OK, CM, MONT, TR) have low accuracy at leeward and in a coastal area. All of them have almost similar performance indicated by no clear distinction of RMSE value from cross validation. CM, MONT, and TR have a good sensitivity with maximum and minimum temperature, indicating that satellite data can improve the gridded rainfall estimates. However, it is required an improvement of daily gridded rainfall estimates since there are large RMSE values and low coefficient correlation in certain days because of strong and erratic behavior of rainy events in a mountainous tropical island of Bali.