A study of mean areal precipitation and spatial structure of rainfall distribution in the Tsen‐Wen river basin

Abstract

In this paper, the kriging method with stochastics was applied in order to study the spatial structure of precipitation distributions. Mean areal precipitation and the spatial structure of six storms over the Tsen‐Wen River basin were examined by semivariograms of the storms.

Findings revealed topographic influences on the rainfall distributions in the study area. These impacts were reflected in the difference between the mean areal precipitation of the kriging and the Thiessen methods and the correlation structure (or range) of the rainfall distributions. The mean areal precipitation showed a difference of 2.5% in favor of the kriging method. The range of the rainfall distribution averaged about 46.17‐km, a very close correlation to the downstream length, 47‐km, of the Tsen‐Wen River. In addition, the smaller the standard deviations of the precipitation distributions, the more appropriate it is to use the assumption of the second‐order stationarity for investigating the storm structures.

Key words:

• thiessen method
• kriging method
• stochastic approach
• semivariogram