Assessment of a Single-site Daily Rainfall Generator in the Middle East

Author

Mhanna, Muamaraldin ; Bauwens, Willy

Author_Institution

Dept. of Hydrol. & Hydraulic Eng., Vrije Univ. Brussel, Brussels, Belgium

fYear

2009

fDate

28-30 Dec. 2009

Firstpage

14

Lastpage

18

Abstract

Most agricultural, hydrological and ecological models require daily rainfall data to run. However, such data at many sites are often incomplete or simply unavailable. In this study we developed a single-site daily rainfall generator for the simulations of rainfall occurrences and amounts in arid and semi-arid areas in the Middle East. A first-order two-state Markov chain was used to determine the occurrence of rainfall. The rainfall amounts on wet days were generated by using the one-parameter Exponential distribution and the two-parameter Gamma distribution. The Markov model was successful in simulating the rainfall occurrences and the Gamma distribution as the more reliability in preserving most of the important daily characteristics of the historical rainfall amounts.

Keywords

Markov processes; agriculture; ecology; hydrology; rain; statistical distributions; Middle East; agricultural model; ecological model; first-order two-state Markov chain; hydrological model; one-parameter exponential distribution; rainfall amounts; rainfall occurrences; single-site daily rainfall generator; two-parameter Gamma distribution; Agricultural engineering; Biological system modeling; Computer science; Data engineering; Ecosystems; Exponential distribution; Hydrology; Meteorology; Stochastic processes; Water resources; Markov chain; daily rainfall model; missing data; precipitation; stochastic process;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Environmental and Computer Science, 2009. ICECS '09. Second International Conference on

Conference_Location

Dubai

Print_ISBN

978-0-7695-3937-9

Electronic_ISBN

978-1-4244-5591-1

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/ICECS.2009.19

Filename

5383563