Comparison of Rainfall Interpolation Methods in a Mountainous Region of a Tropical Island
Publication: Journal of Hydrologic Engineering
Volume 16, Issue 4
Abstract
A total of 21 gauges across the mountainous leeward portion of the island of Oʻahu, Hawaiʻi, were used to compare rainfall interpolation methods and assess rainfall spatial variability over a 34-month monitoring period from 2005 to 2008. Traditional and geostatistical interpolation methods, including Thiessen polygon, inverse distance weighting (IDW), linear regression, ordinary kriging (OK), and simple kriging with varying local means (SKlm), were used to estimate wet and dry season rainfall. The linear regression and SKlm methods were used to incorporate two types of exhaustive secondary information: (1) elevation extracted from a digital elevation model (DEM), and (2) distance to a regional rainfall maximum. The Thiessen method produced the highest error, whereas OK produced the lowest error in all but one period. The OK method produced more accurate predictions than linear regression of rainfall against elevation when the correlation between rainfall and elevation is moderate (). The SKlm method produced lower error than linear regression and IDW methods in all periods. Comparison of the OK interpolation map with gridded isohyet data indicate that the areas of greatest rainfall deficit were confined to the mountainous region of west Oʻahu.
Get full access to this article
View all available purchase options and get full access to this article.
Acknowledgments
The project was supported by two grants from the U.S. Department of Agriculture: (1) Cooperative State Research, Education and Extension Service Grant No. UNSPECIFIED2004-34135-15058, (2) McIntire-Stennis formula Grant No. UNSPECIFIED2006-34135-17690. Special thanks to Nghia Dai Tran, Domingos Maria, Viktor Polyakov, Mohammad Safeeq, and Guanghong Yang for all their assistance with the field and database work. The writers wish to thank the Honolulu Board of Water Supply and members of Mohala I Ka Wai for their assistance and cooperation. Finally, the writers wish to thank three anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments.
References
Bacchi, B., and Kottegoda, N. T. (1995). “Identification and calibration of spatial correlation patterns of rainfall.” J. Hydrol. (Amsterdam, Neth.), 165, 311–348.
Buytaert, W., Celleri, R., Willems, P., De Beivre, B., and Wyseure, G. (2006). “Spatial and temporal rainfall variability in mountainous areas: A case study from the south Ecuadorian Andes.” J. Hydrol. (Amsterdam, Neth.), 329, 413–421.
Campling, P., Gobin, A., and Feyen, J. (2001). “Temporal and spatial rainfall analysis across a humid tropical catchment.” Hydrol. Processes, 15, 359–375.
Cao, G., Giambelluca, T. W., Stevens, D. E., and Schroeder, T. A. (2007). “Inversion variability in the Hawaiian trade wind regime.” J. Clim., 20, 1145–1160.
Carrera-Hernandez, J. J., and Gaskin, S. J. (2007). “Spatio temporal analysis of daily precipitation and temperature in the basin of Mexico.” J. Hydrol. (Amsterdam, Neth.), 336, 231–249.
Christel, P., and Reed, D. W. (1999). “Mapping extreme rainfall in a mountainous region using geostatistical techniques: A case study in Scotland.” Int. J. Climatol., 19, 1337–1356.
Creutin, J. D., Delrieu, G., and Lebel, T. (1988). “Rain measurement by rain gage-radar combination: a geostatistical approach.” J. Atmos. Ocean. Technol., 5, 102–115.
Daly, C., Neilson, R. P., and Phillips, D. L. (1994). “A statistical topographic model for mapping climatological precipitation over mountainous terrain.” J. Appl. Meteorol., 33, 140–158.
Deutsch, C. V., and Journel, A. G. (1998). GSLIB, Geostatistical software library and user's guide, 2nd Ed., Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK.
Diaz, H. F., Chu, P.-S., and Eischeid, J. K. (2005). “Rainfall changes in Hawaii during the last century.” 16th Conf. on Climate Variability and Change, San Diego.
Drogue, G., Humbert, J., Deraisme, J., Mahrb, N., and Freslonc, N. (2002). “A statistical-topographic model using an omni-directional parameterization of the relief for mapping orographic rainfall.” Int. J. Climatol., 22, 599–613.
ESRI, Inc. (2008). ArcEditor 9.3.1 [Computer software]. Redlands, CA.
Fontaine, R. A. (1996). “Evaluation of the surface water quantity, surface water quality, and rainfall data collection programs in Hawaii, 1994.” U.S. Geological Survey Water Resources Investigations Rep. 95-4212, 125–126.
Giambelluca, T. W., Diaz, H. F., and Luke, M. S. A. (2008). “Secular temperature changes in Hawaiʻi.” Geophys. Res. Lett., 35, L12702.
Giambelluca, T. W., Nullet, M. A., and Schroeder, T. A. (1986). “Rainfall atlas of Hawaiʻi.” Rep. R76, Dept. of Land and Natural Resources, Honolulu, 267.
Goovaerts, P. (1997). Geostatistics for natural resources evaluation, Oxford University Press, New York.
Goovaerts, P. (2000). “Geostatistical approaches for incorporating elevation into the spatial interpolation of rainfall.” J. Hydrol. (Amsterdam, Neth.), 228, 113–129.
Goovaerts, P. (2010). “Geostatistical software.” Handbook of applied spatial analysis: Software tools methods and applications, M. M. Fischer and A. Getis, eds., Springer-Verlag, Berlin, 129–138.
Hansen, T. M. (2010). mGstat, v. 0.97, a geostatistical Matlab toolbox, Lyngby, Denmark.
Hevesi, J. A., Istok, J. D., and Flint, A. L. (1992). “Precipitation estimation in mountainous terrain using multivariate geostatistics. Part I: Structural analysis.” J. Appl. Meteorol., 31, 661–676.
Isaaks, E. H., Srivastava, R. M. (1989). An introduction to applied geostatistics, Oxford University Press, New York.
Johnston, K., Ver Hoef, J. M., Krivoruchko, K., and Lucas, N. (2001). Using ArcGIS Geostatistical Analyst, ESRI, Redlands, CA.
Lau, L. S., and Mink, J. F. (2006). Hydrology of the Hawaiian Islands, Univ. of Hawaiʻi Press, Honolulu.
Mair, A. and Fares, A. (2010a). “Influence of groundwater pumping and rainfall spatio-temporal variation on streamflow.” J. Hydrol. (Amsterdam, Neth.), 393(3–4), 287–308.
Mair, A., and Fares, A. (2010b). “Assessing rainfall data homogeneity and estimating missing records in Mākaha Valley, Oʻahu, Hawaiʻi.” J. Hydrol. Eng., 15, 61–66.
McCuen, R. H. (1989). Hydrologic analysis and design, Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ.
McCuen, R. H. (2003). Modeling hydrologic change: Statistical methods, Lewis, Boca Raton, FL.
Moriasi, D. N., Arnold, J. G., Van Liew, M. W., Bingner, R. L., Harmel, R. D., and Veith, T. L. (2007). “Model evaluation guidelines for systematic quantification of accuracy in watershed simulations.” Trans. ASABE, 50, 885–900.
Raspa, G., Tucci, M., and Bruno, R. (1997). “Reconstruction of rainfall fields by combining ground rain gauges data with radar maps using external drift method.” Geostatistics Wollongong ′96, E. Y. Baafi and N. A. Schofield, eds., Kluwer Academic, Dordrecht, The Netherlands.
Robertson, G. P. (2008). GS+: Geostatistics for the environmental sciences, Gamma Design Software, Plainwell, MI.
Sarangi, A., Cox, C. A., and Madramootoo, C. A. (2005). “Geostatistical methods for prediction of spatial variability of rainfall in a mountainous region.” Trans. ASABE, 48, 943–954.
SAS, Inc. (2010). Enterprise Guide 4.3 [Computer software], Carey, NC.
Schroeder, T. A. (1981). “A revised precipitation climatology of the Hawaiian islands.” 4th Conf. of Hydrometeorology, Reno, NV.
Seo, D. J., Krajewski, W. F., Azimi-Zonooz, A., and Bowles, D. S. (1990). “Stochastic interpolation of rainfall data from rain gages and radar using cokriging. II. Results.” Water Resour. Res., 26, 915–924.
Shepard, D. (1968). “A two-dimensional interpolation function for irregularly-spaced data.” Association for Computing Machinery 23rd Annual Conf., ACM, New York.
Thiessen, A. H. (1911). “Precipitation averages for large areas.” Mon. Weather Rev., 39, 1082–1089.
Townscape, Inc. (2009). Waiʻanae watershed management plan, pre-final draft prepared for Honolulu Board of Water Supply, Honolulu.
Information & Authors
Information
Published In
Copyright
© 2011 American Society of Civil Engineers.
History
Received: Nov 30, 2009
Accepted: Sep 2, 2010
Published online: Oct 1, 2010
Published in print: Apr 1, 2011
Authors
Metrics & Citations
Metrics
Citations
Download citation
If you have the appropriate software installed, you can download article citation data to the citation manager of your choice. Simply select your manager software from the list below and click Download.