Delineation of precipitation regions in two Canadian study areas: the role of the temporal resolution of the precipitation data |
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| Authors: | Sarah Irwin Slobodan P Simonovic Donald H Burn |
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| Institution: | 1. Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, The University of Western Ontario, London, Canada;2. Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Canada |
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| Abstract: | The identification of homogeneous precipitation regions has value in many water resources engineering applications (infrastructure planning, design, operations; climate forecasting, modelling). The objective of this paper is to assess the sensitivity of precipitation regions to the temporal resolution (monthly, seasonal, annual and the annual maximum series) of the data. The presented method uses the fuzzy c-means clustering algorithm to partition climate sites into statistically homogeneous precipitation regions. The regions are validated using an approach based on L-moment statistics. The method is conducted in two climatically different study areas in western and eastern Canada. There does not appear to be a relationship between the spatial distributions of the regions formed using different temporal resolutions of the precipitation data. It is recommended to delineate precipitation regions that are specific to the task at hand, and to select a temporal resolution that is consistent with the final application of the regional precipitation dataset. EDITOR A. Castellarin; ASSOCIATE EDITOR T. Kjeldsen |
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| Keywords: | spatial temporal regional frequency climate clustering L-moments precipitation |
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