Spatial climate variation pattern and regional prediction of rainfall in Jordan

Abstract

Currently Jordan is facing various water problems accompanied by rapid population growth, urbanisation and industrialisation. It is of outmost importance to search for water resources augmentation possibilities leading to decision‐making procedures by addressing the rainfall sources as the main water resources in Jordan, through refined techniques. Point cumulative semivariogram (PCSV) samples are analysed in order to identify the regional dependence of the rainfall phenomena. Amman station is taken as a pivot site because of its location in the centre of the Kingdom, where the samples of the PCSV are calculated for eight systematic directions. Standard regional dependence function (SRDF) is obtained from the sample PCSV and the weighted average procedure is applied with the help of SRDF to predict the rainfall amounts. The radius of rainfall influence is determined for Amman in each direction. The cross‐validation methods are used to predict the rainfall in Amman using different samples representing along each direction. The result of cross‐validation method is acceptable in all samples with relative error not exceeding 10%, except in the desert sides where larger errors indicate weak regional dependence.

Estimation of consistent wet period characteristics for further improvement of water resources studies

“…; De Laat & Nonner ; Sharadqah ). Therefore, it is an important issue to search for water resources development possibilities considering the rainfall sources as the main water resource in Jordan (Tarawneh & Sen ).…”

“…Despite the intensive efforts made to harvest winter rain, this resource in Jordan is limited and always subjected to continuous stress to satisfy the increasing water needs for drinking, agricultural and industrial purposes (Scott et al 2003;De Laat & Nonner 2012;Sharadqah 2014). Therefore, it is an important issue to search for water resources development possibilities considering the rainfall sources as the main water resource in Jordan (Tarawneh & Sen 2011).…”