Rainfall Estimation in Hamedan Province Using Geostatistical Methods

G. Golmohammadi¹, S. Maroofi¹, K. Mohammadi²

¹BooAli University, Hamedan, Iran

² Presenting Author:
Dr. Kourosh Mohammadi
Tarbiat Modarres University, Tehran, Iran
e-mail: kouroshm@modares.ac.ir

Abstract

Rainfall is an important phenomenon especially in dryland areas. Usually, the number of stations to monitor the rainfall occurrence is not sufficient in those areas; therefore, an accurate interpolation method is necessary. In recent decades, geostatistical methods have been used extensively for interpolation of different spatial parameters. In this paper, the applicability of the geostatistical methods in estimation of rainfall in Hamedan province located in west of Iran has been investigated. In Hamedan province, rainfed agriculture is used for wheat and barely and rainfall has important affect on farmers' economy. In order to generalize the results for the area, three different meteorological years, dry, normal and wet, were selected. In addition, yearly average precipitation was used to compare the results with the three selected years. All analysis was done in GIS environment and for assessment of the methods, cross validation graph and comparing between the observed and calculated values were used. Results showed that radial basis function with thin plate spline function had better performance and it can be recommended for the province.

Keywords: geostatistic, rainfall, Hamedan Province, Interpolation