A geostatistical approach for areal rainfall statistics assessment

Areal rainfall statistics are more relevant in flood hydrology and water resources management than point rainfall statistics when it comes to help designing dams or hydraulic structures. This paper presents a geostatistically based method to derive the areal statistics from point statistics. Assuming that the distribution models of point rainfall and areal belong to the same class of models and that the rainfall process is stationary, it is shown how the parameters of the areal distribution model can directly be computed from the parameters of the point distribution models in case of a non stationary process, an approximation is derived that yielded good results when applied to a mountainous region in Southern France. The method also allows the computation of the areal reduction factors in a very general form.