| Abstract: | Spatial rainfall amounts accumulated over short to medium periods of time, say a few days, tend to have a probabilistic structure with very distinctive features. Some of these that are specially relevant for the purpose of spatial modeling are the presence of mixed sampling distributions, right skewed distributions conditional on rainfall occurrence, and a complex spatial association structure. The goal of this work is to construct a family for the bivariate distributions of spatial rainfall fields that incorporates these distinctive features. It is based on the separate modeling of spatial occurrence of rainfall and the spatial distribution of positive rainfalls. The main properties of the bivariate distributions are derived, and some properties of the random field realizations are illustrated through simulation. Some limitations of the proposed model are also discussed. |
