An Approach to Near-Real-Time Rainfall Mapping in Hawai'i
Abstract
High spatial resolution digital rainfall maps are useful for a wide range of applications in resource management and research in areas such as hydrological and ecosystem processes and climate change assessment and adaptation. In Hawai'i, digital rainfall map products have emerged as end products of projects, however, the available maps are never fully up to date. The gap between the latest available maps and the next update is variable and uncertain, depending on the efforts of individual investigators to seek and obtain funding for the work. Many possible uses of rainfall maps, especially for operational objectives, including flood forecasting, drought monitoring, fire hazard assessment, irrigation management, and crop yield prediction, are not well served by the current availability of high resolution gridded rainfall products in Hawai'i. To address this problem, we are currently developing a process to automate all the steps in making new rainfall maps: data acquisition, data quality assessment and quality control, gap filling, spatial interpolation, error evaluation, and uploading to a publicly available internet server. By automating the process and thereby reducing its cost, we plan to implement a system for producing near-real-time rainfall maps with spatial error analyses, at monthly and daily intervals. Here we present details of process, compare alternative approaches for each step in the process, show example products, and discuss future plans for this work.
- Publication:
-
AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2018
- Bibcode:
- 2018AGUFM.H41H..12G
- Keywords:
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- 3354 Precipitation;
- ATMOSPHERIC PROCESSESDE: 1840 Hydrometeorology;
- HYDROLOGYDE: 1854 Precipitation;
- HYDROLOGYDE: 4303 Hydrological;
- NATURAL HAZARDS