Chaotic Disaggregation of Daily Rainfall Time Series

Abstract

Disaggregation techniques are widely used to transform observed daily rainfall values into hourly ones, which serve as important inputs for flood forecasting purposes. However, an important limitation with most of the existing disaggregation techniques is that they treat the rainfall process as a realization of a stochastic process, thus raising questions on the lack of connection between the structure of the models on one hand and the underlying physics of the rainfall process on the other.The present study introduces a nonlinear deterministic (and specifically chaotic) framework to study the dynamic characteristics of rainfall distributions across different temporal scales (i.e. weights between scales), and thus the possibility of rainfall disaggregation. Rainfall data from the Seoul station (recorded by the Korea Meteorological Administration) are considered for the present investigation, and weights between only successively doubled resolutions (i.e., 24-hr to 12-hr, 12-hr to 6-hr, 6-hr to 3-hr) are analyzed. The correlation dimension method is employed to investigate the presence of chaotic behavior in the time series of weights, and a local approximation technique is employed for rainfall disaggregation. The results indicate the presence of chaotic behavior in the dynamics of weights between the successively doubled scales studied. The modeled (disaggregated) rainfall values are found to be in good agreement with the observed ones in their overall matching (e.g. correlation coefficient and low mean square error). While the general trend (rainfall amount and time of occurrence) is clearly captured, an underestimation of the maximum values are found.