Interpretation of spatio-temporal variation of precipitation from spatially sparse measurements using Bayesian compressive sensing (BCS)

ABSTRACT

Precipitation might change rapidly and vary spatially, therefore, knowledge on spatio-temporal variation of precipitation plays a pivotal role in water resources management, hydrogeological hazard and risk assessment, and city resilience enhancement. However, precipitation monitoring data are collected through a limited number of precipitation stations in practice, and they are often sparse and discontinuous, particularly in spatial domain. Furthermore, regional precipitation data exhibits characteristics of seasonality, periodicity and highly non-stationarity on a long-time scale. Therefore, it is challenging to obtain a spatio-temporal variation of precipitation with high spatial resolution from monitoring data measured at a limited number of precipitation stations. To address these challenges, this study develops a non-parametric spatio-temporal Bayesian compressive sensing (ST-BCS) method for interpolation of spatio-temporally varying, but sparsely measured precipitation data in the spatial domain. The proposed method is able to not only provide precipitation interpolation results with high spatial resolution from a limited number of monitoring stations, but also quantify the associated interpolation uncertainty simultaneously. In addition, ST-BCS is directly applicable to the non-stationary spatio-temporal meteorological data. Furthermore, real precipitation datasets are established to benchmark different spatio-temporal interpolation methods. The benchmarking results show that the proposed ST-BCS method performs well and outperforms the spatial BCS method.

KEYWORDS:

• Spatio-temporal data
• Bayesian compressive sensing
• non-parametric data
• sparse spatial data
• benchmarking datasets

Acknowledgements

The work described in this paper was supported by a grant from the Research Grant Council of Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (Project no. C6006-20G) and a grant from Shenzhen Science and Technology Innovation Commission (Shenzhen-Hong Kong-Macau Science and Technology Project (Category C) No: SGDX20210823104002020), China. The financial support is gratefully acknowledged.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

Benchmarking datasets established in this study can be found in the attachment.