RainSim: A spatial-temporal stochastic rainfall modelling system

Environmental Modelling and Software

Volumn 23, Issue 12, 2008, Pages 1356-1369

  Burton, A ^a   Kilsby, C G ^a   Fowler, H J ^a   Cowpertwait, P S P ^b   O'Connell, P E ^a  

^a NEWCASTLE UNIVERSITY   (United Kingdom)

^b MASSEY UNIVERSITY   (New Zealand)

Author keywords

Extremes; Multi site; NSRP; Poisson process; Precipitation; Rainfall; Shuffled Complex Evolution; Simulator; Spatial; Stochastic; Temporal

Indexed keywords

BOOLEAN FUNCTIONS; CALIBRATION; CATCHMENTS; CLUSTER ANALYSIS; CURING; DRYING; EVOLUTIONARY ALGORITHMS; FUNCTION EVALUATION; MATHEMATICAL TRANSFORMATIONS; PARAMETER ESTIMATION; POISSON DISTRIBUTION; POISSON EQUATION; RANDOM VARIABLES; RISK ASSESSMENT; STATISTICAL METHODS; STATISTICS; STOCHASTIC PROGRAMMING; TIME SERIES ANALYSIS;

(001) PARAMETER; (E ,3E) PROCESS; CONVERGENCE CRITERION; ELSEVIER (CO); END-USER APPLICATIONS; EVOLUTION (CO); IMPROVED MODELS; MODEL CALIBRATION; MULTI-SITE; NON-UNIFORM SCALING; NUMERICAL OPTIMIZATIONS; OBJECTIVE FUNCTION (OF); OROGRAPHIC EFFECTS; POISSON PROCESSES; RAINFALL FIELDS; RAINFALL MODELLING; RAINFALL STATISTICS; RECTANGULAR PULSES; SINGLE SITES; SPATIAL APPLICATIONS; SPATIAL POISSON PROCESS; STORM EVENTS; TIME SERIES;

RAIN;

ALGORITHM; CALIBRATION; HYDROLOGICAL MODELING; NUMERICAL METHOD; OPTIMIZATION; POISSON RATIO; RAINFALL; STOCHASTICITY;

BELGIUM; BENELUX; EURASIA; EUROPE; NETHERLANDS; WESTERN EUROPE;

EID: 48049120409     PISSN: 13648152     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1016/j.envsoft.2008.04.003     Document Type: Article

References (74)

1. Bardossy A. Generating precipitation time series using simulated annealing. Water Resources Research 34 7 (1998) 1737-1744
2. Bardossy A., and Plate E.J. Space-time model for daily rainfall using atmospheric circulation patterns. Water Resources Research 28 5 (1992) 1247-1259
3. Bathurst J.C., Moretti G., El-Hames A., Moaven-Hashemi A., and Burton A. Scenario modelling of basin-scale, shallow landslide sediment yield, Valsassina, Italian Southern Alps. Natural Hazards and Earth System Sciences 5 (2005) 189-202
4. Bathurst J.C., and Bovolo C.I. Development of Guidelines for Sustainable Land Management in the Agri and Cobres Target Basins. Deliverable 28 of the EU funded MEDACTION project, 37 pp. Available from (2004). http://www.ncl.ac.uk/medaction
5. Blenkinsop S., Fowler H.J., Burton A., Nolan B.T., Surdyk N., and Dubus I.G. Representative Climatic Records (2006). http://www.eu-footprint.org/ Report DL9 of the FP6 EU-funded FOOTPRINT project, 59 pp. Available from:
6. Blenkinsop S., and Fowler H.J. Changes in drought characteristics for Europe projected by the PRUDENCE regional climate models. International Journal of Climatology 27 12 (2007) 1595-1610
7. Brath A., Montanari A., and Moretti G. Assessing the effect on flood frequency of land use change via hydrological simulation (with uncertainty). Journal of Hydrology 324 1-4 (2006) 141-153
8. Burlando P., and Rosso R. Effects of transient climate change on basin hydrology. 1. Precipitation scenarios for the Arno River, central Italy. Hydrological Processes 16 6 (2002) 1151-1175
9. Burton A., and Fowler H.J. Development of Daily Rainfall Models for Catchment Case-Studies, Production of Daily Time Series for Catchments, AquaTerra Deliverable H1.3. European Union FP6 Integrated Project AquaTerra (Project no. 505428) (2005) 32 pp.
10. Burton A., and O'Connell P.E. Final Report by Partner 4 of the FRAMEWORK Project. A Project of the EU Environment and Climate Research Programme, project number ENV4-CT97-0529, 85 pp. Available from: (2000). http://www.diiar.polimi.it/framework/doc/Partner4.PDF
11. Calenda G., and Napolitana F. Parameter estimation of Neyman-Scott processes for temporal point rainfall simulation. Journal of Hydrology 225 1 (1999) 45-66
12. Chandler R.E. A spectral method for estimating parameters in rainfall models. Bernoulli 3 (1997) 1-22
13. Chandler R.E., and Wheater H.S. Analysis of rainfall variability using generalised linear models: a case study from the west of Ireland. Water Resources Research 38 10 (2002) 1192
14. Conway D., and Jones P.D. The use of weather types and air flow indices for GCM downscaling. Journal of Hydrology 212-213 (1998) 348-361
15. Cowpertwait P.S.P. Further developments of the Neyman-Scott clustered point process for modelling rainfall. Water Resources Research 27 7 (1991) 1431-1438
16. Cowpertwait P.S.P. A generalized point process model for rainfall. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London 447 (1994) 23-37
17. Cowpertwait P.S.P. A generalized spatial-temporal model of rainfall based on a clustered point process. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London 450 (1995) 163-175
18. Cowpertwait P.S.P., O'Connell P.E., Metcalfe A.V., and Mawdsley J.A. Stochastic point process modelling of rainfall. I. Single site fitting and validation. Journal of Hydrology 175 (1996) 17-46
19. Cowpertwait P.S.P., O'Connell P.E., Metcalfe A.V., and Mawdsley J.A. Stochastic point process modelling of rainfall. II. Regionalisation and disaggregation. Journal of Hydrology 175 (1996) 47-65
20. Cowpertwait P.S.P., and O'Connell P.E. A regionalised Neyman-Scott model of rainfall with convective and stratiform cells. Hydrology and Earth System Sciences 1 (1997) 71-80
21. Cowpertwait P.S.P. A Poisson-cluster model of rainfall: high-order moments and extreme values. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London 454 (1998) 885-898
22. Cowpertwait P.S.P., Kilsby C.G., and O'Connell P.E. A spatial-temporal Neyman-Scott model of rainfall: empirical analysis of extremes. Water Resources Research 38 8 (2002) Art. No. 1131
23. Cowpertwait P.S.P. A spatial-temporal point process model of rainfall for the Thames catchment, UK. Journal of Hydrology 330 3-4 (2006) 586-595
24. Dawson R., Hall J., Speight L., Djordjevic S., Savic D., and Leandro J. Flood risk analysis to support integrated urban drainage. Proceedings of the Fourth CIWEM Annual Conference on Emerging Environmental Issues and Future Challenges. 12-14 September 2006, Newcastle upon Tyne (2006), Aqua Enviro
25. Duan Q.Y., Gupta V.K., and Sorooshian S. Shuffled complex evolution approach for effective and efficient global minimization. Journal of Optimization Theory and Applications 76 3 (1993) 501-521
26. Ewen J., O'Donnell G., Burton A., and O'Connell P.E. Errors and uncertainty in physically-based rainfall-runoff modelling of catchment change effects. Journal of Hydrology 330 3-4 (2006) 641-650
27. Favre A.C., Musy A., and Morgenthaler S. Two-site modeling of rainfall based on the Neyman-Scott process. Water Resources Research 38 12 (2002) Art. No. 1307
28. Favre A.C., Musy A., and Morgenthaler S. Unbiased parameter estimation of the Neyman-Scott model for rainfall simulation with related confidence interval. Journal of Hydrology 286 1-4 (2004) 168-178
29. Fowler H.J., Kilsby C.G., and O'Connell P.E. A stochastic rainfall model for the assessment of regional water resource systems under changed climatic conditions. Hydrology and Earth System Sciences 4 (2000) 261-280
30. Fowler H.J., Kilsby C.G., O'Connell P.E., and Burton A. A weather-type conditioned multi-site stochastic rainfall model for the generation of scenarios of climatic variability and change. Journal of Hydrology 308 1-4 (2005) 50-66
31. Fowler H.J., and Kilsby C.G. Using regional climate model data to simulate historical and future river flows in northwest England. Climatic Change 80 3-4 (2007) 337-367
32. Fowler H.J., Ekström M., Blenkinsop S., and Smith A.P. Estimating change in extreme European precipitation using a multi-model ensemble. Journal of Geophysical Research - Atmospheres 112 (2007) D18104 10.1029/2007JD008619
33. Furrer E.M., and Katz R.W. Generalized linear modeling approach to stochastic weather generators. Climate Research 34 2 (2007) 129-144
34. Gabriel K.R., and Neumann J. A Markov chain model for daily rainfall occurrence at Tel Aviv. Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society 88 (1962) 90-95
35. Gregory J.M., Wigley T.M.L., and Jones P.D. Determining and interpreting the order of a 2-state Markov-chain - application to models of daily precipitation. Water Resources Research 28 5 (1992) 1443-1446
36. Gupta V.K., and Waymire E. A stochastic kinematic study of subsynoptic space-time rainfall. Water Resources Research 15 (1979) 637-644
37. Hall J.W., Dawson R.J., Speight L., Djordjevic S., Savic D., and Leandro J. Attribution of flood risk in urban areas. In: Gourbesville P., Cunge J., Guinot V., and Liong S.-Y. (Eds). Nice, 4-8 September. Hydroinformatics 2006: Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Hydroinformatics vol. I (2006), Research Publishing Services, Chennai, India 280-287
38. Haylock M. STARDEX Core Indices. STARDEX project, 1 pp. Available from: (2004). http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/projects/stardex/
39. Haylock M., and Nicholls N. Trends in extreme rainfall indices for an updated high quality data set for Australia, 1910-1998. International Journal of Climatology 20 (2000) 1533-1541
40. Hulme M., Jenkins G.J., Lu X., Turnpenny J.R., Mitchell T.D., Jones R.G., Lowe J., Murphy J.M., Hassell D., Boorman P., McDonald R., and Hill S. Climate Change Scenarios for the United Kingdom: The UKCIP02 Scientific Report (2002), Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research. School of Environmental Sciences, University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK 120 pp.
41. Jothityangkoon C., Sivapalan M., and Viney N.R. Tests of a space-time model of daily rainfall in southwestern Australia based on nonhomogeneous random cascades. Water Resources Research 36 1 (2000) 267-284
42. Kilsby C.G., Cowpertwait P.S.P., O'Connell P.E., and Jones P.D. Predicting rainfall statistics in England and Wales using atmospheric circulation variables. International Journal of Climatology 18 5 (1998) 523-539
43. Kilsby, C.G., Burton, A., Birkinshaw, S.J., Hashemi, A.M., O'Connell, P.E., 2000. Extreme rainfall and flood frequency distribution modelling for present and future climates. In: Proceedings of the British Hydrological Society Seventh National Hydrology Symposium, pp. 3.51-3.56.
44. Kilsby C.G., and Burton A. Rainfall modelling. (Chapter 4). In: Kilsby C.G. (Ed). Final Report of the WRINCLE Project, Project Number ENV4-CT97-0452 of the EU Environment and Climate Research Programme (2001) 47-53. Available from: http://www.ncl.ac.uk/wrincle/
45. Kilsby C.G., Jones P.D., Burton A., Ford A.C., Fowler H.J., Harpham C., James P., Smith A., and Wilby R.L. A daily weather generator for use in climate change studies. Environmental Modelling and Software 22 (2007) 1705-1719
46. Kistler R., Kalnay E., Collins W., Saha S., White G., Woollen J., Chelliah M., Ebisuzaki W., Kanamitsu M., Kousky V., van den Dool H., Jenne R., and Fiorino M. The NCEP-NCAR 50-year reanalysis: monthly means CD-ROM and documentation. Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society 82 (2001) 247-268
47. Le Cam L.M. A stochastic description of precipitation. In: Neyman J. (Ed). Proceedings of the Fourth Berkeley Symposium on Mathematical Statistics and Probability vol. 3 (1961), University of California, Berkeley, California 165-186
48. Marani M. On the correlation structure of continuous and discrete point rainfall. Water Resources Research 39 5 (2003) Art. No. 1128
49. Mehrotra R., and Sharma A. A nonparametric nonhomogeneous hidden Markov model for downscaling of multisite daily rainfall occurrences. Journal of Geophysical Research 110 (2005) D16108 10.1029/2004JD005677
50. Metropolis N., Rosenbluth A., Rosenbluth M., Teller M., and Teller E. Equations of state calculations by fast computing machines. Journal of Chemical Physics 21 (1953) 1087-1092
51. Montanari A., and Brath A. Maximum likelihood estimation for the seasonal Neyman-Scott rectangular pulses model for rainfall. In: Claps P., and Siccardi F. (Eds). Mediterranean Storms, Proceedings of the Plinius Conference '99 (2000), Editoriale Bios, Cosenza, Italy 297-310 GNDCI Publication No. 2012
52. Moretti G., and Montanari A. Estimation of the peak river flow for an ungauged mountain creek using a distributed rainfall-runoff model. In: Brath A., Montanari A., and Toth E. (Eds). Hydrological Risk: Recent Advances in Peak River Flow Modelling, Prediction and Real-Time Forecasting - Assessment of the Impacts of Land-Use and Climate Changes (2004), BIOS, Cosenza, Italy 113-128
53. Nelder J.A., and Mead R. A simplex method for function minimization. Computer Journal 7 (1965) 308-313
54. Neyman J., and Scott E.L. Statistical approach to problems of cosmology. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series B 20 1 (1958) 1-43
55. Nolan, B.T., Dubus, I.G., Surdyk, N., Fowler, H.J., Burton, A., Hollis, J.M., Reichenberger, S., Jarvis, N.J. Identification of key climatic factors regulating the transport of pesticides in leaching and to tile drains. Pest Management Science, in press, doi:10.1002/ps.1587.
56. Olsson J., and Burlando P. Reproduction of temporal scaling by a rectangular pulses rainfall model. Hydrological Processes 16 3 (2002) 611-630
57. Onof C., Chandler R.E., Kakou A., Northrop P., Wheater H.S., and Isham V. Rainfall modelling using Poisson-cluster processes: a review of developments. Stochastic Environmental Research and Risk Assessment 14 6 (2000) 384-411
58. Pegram G.G.S., and Clothier A.N. Downscaling rainfields in space and time, using the String of Beads model in time series mode. Hydrology and Earth System Sciences 5 2 (2001) 175-186
59. Perry M., and Hollis D. The development of a new set of long-term climate averages for the UK. International Journal of Climatology 25 8 (2005) 1023-1039
60. Perry M., and Hollis D. The generation of monthly gridded datasets for a range of climatic variables over the UK. International Journal of Climatology 25 8 (2005) 1041-1054
61. Press W.H., Teukolsky S.A., Vettering W.T., and Flannery B.P. Numerical Recipes in C++. second ed. (2002), Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK
62. Rodriguez-Iturbe I., Cox D.R., and Isham V. Some models for rainfall based on stochastic point processes. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, Series A 410 (1987) 269-288
63. Rodriguez-Iturbe I., Febres de Power B., and Valdes J.B. Rectangular pulses point process models for rainfall: analysis of empirical data. Journal of Geophysical Research 92 (1987) 9645-9656
64. Rozos E., Efstratiadis A., Nalbantis I., and Koutsoyiannis D. Calibration of a semi-distributed model for conjunctive simulation of surface and groundwater flows. Hydrological Sciences Journal/Journal des Sciences Hydrologiques 49 5 (2004) 819-842
65. Seed A.W., Srikanthan R., and Menabde M. A space and time model for design storm rainfall. Journal Geophysical Research Atmospheres 104 D24 (1999) 31623-31630
66. Segond M.L., Onof C., and Wheater H.S. Spatial-temporal disaggregation of daily rainfall from a generalized linear model. Journal of Hydrology 331 (2006) 674-689
67. Srikanthan R., and McMahon T.A. Stochastic generation of annual, monthly and daily climate data: a review. Hydrology and Earth System Sciences 5 4 (2001) 653-670
68. Stehlik J., and Bardossy A. Multivariate stochastic downscaling model for generating daily precipitation series based on atmospheric circulation. Journal of Hydrology 256 1-2 (2002) 120-141
69. Velghe T., Troch P.A., De Troch F.P., and Van de Velde J. Evaluation of cluster-based rectangular pulses point process models for rainfall. Water Resources Research 30 10 (1994) 2847-2857
70. Wheater H.S., Chandler R.E., Onof C.J., Isham V.S., Bellone E., Yang C., Lekkas D., Lourmas G., and Segond M.-L. Spatial-temporal rainfall modelling for flood risk estimation. Stochastic Environmental Research and Risk Assessment 19 (2005) 403-416
71. Wilby R.L., Tomlinson O.J., and Dawson C.W. Multi-site simulation of precipitation by conditional resampling. Climate Research 23 3 (2003) 183-194
72. Wilks D.S. Multisite generalization of a daily stochastic precipitation generation model. Journal of Hydrology 210 (1998) 178-191
73. Wilks D.S., and Wilby R.L. The weather generation game: a review of stochastic weather models. Progress in Physical Geography 23 3 (1999) 329-357
74. Wood A.W., Leung L.R., Sridhar V., and Lettenmaier D.P. Hydrologic implications of dynamical and statistical approaches to downscaling climate model outputs. Climatic Change 62 (2004) 189-216