Spatial interpolation of daily totals of rainfall

Abstract

Some experiments concerning the spatial interpolation of daily rainfall totals are reported. Several well-known techniques were evaluated in an experimental way, namely by using the given technique for the estimation of the rainfall amount at a place where the rainfall was also measured. In each experiment the same data set was used, so comparison of the performance of the different techniques was quite simple. The used techniques were all of the type of weighted average of surrounding stations (which type includes also plane-fitting techniques but not — for instance — spline fitting, etc.). The results of these experiments indicate that for the western part of The Netherlands the choice of weights is not very critical and that optimization of weights is hardly necessary. This paper is a summary of a Research Report of the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute.