Effect of the inter-annual variability of rainfall statistics on stochastically generated rainfall time series: part 1. Impact on peak and extreme rainfall values

Abstract

A noble approach of stochastic rainfall generation that can account for inter-annual variability of the observed rainfall is proposed. Firstly, we show that the monthly rainfall statistics that is typically used as the basis of the calibration of the parameters of the Poisson cluster rainfall generators has significant inter-annual variability and that lumping them into a single value could be an oversimplification. Then, we propose a noble approach that incorporates the inter-annual variability to the traditional approach of Poisson cluster rainfall modeling by adding the process of simulating rainfall statistics of individual months. Among 132 gage-months used for the model verification, the proportion that the suggested approach successfully reproduces the observed design rainfall values within 20 % error varied between 0.67 and 0.83 while the same value corresponding to the traditional approach varied between 0.21 and 0.60. This result suggests that the performance of the rainfall generation models can be largely improved not only by refining the model structure but also by incorporating more information about the observed rainfall, especially the inter-annual variability of the rainfall statistics.