Impacts of Characteristics of Errors in Radar Rainfall Estimates for Rainfall-Runoff Simulation

Abstract:

For flood prediction, weather radar has been commonly employed to measure the amount of precipitation and its spatial distribution. However, estimated rainfall from the radar contains uncertainty caused by its errors such as beam blockage and ground clutter. Even though, previous studies have been focused on removing error of radar data, it is crucial to evaluate runoff volumes which are influenced primarily by the radar errors. Furthermore, resolution of rainfall modeled by previous studies for rainfall uncertainty analysis or distributed hydrological simulation are quite coarse to apply to real application. Therefore, in the current study, we tested the effects of radar rainfall errors on rainfall runoff with a high resolution approach, called spatial error model (SEM). In the current study, the synthetic generation of random and cross-correlated radar errors were employed as SEM. A number of events for the Nam River dam region were tested to investigate the peak discharge from a basin according to error variance. The results indicate that the dependent error brings much higher variations in peak discharge than the independent random error. To further investigate the effect of the magnitude of cross-correlation between radar errors, the different magnitudes of spatial cross-correlations were employed for the rainfall-runoff simulation. The results demonstrate that the stronger correlation leads to higher variation of peak discharge and vice versa. We conclude that the error structure in radar rainfall estimates significantly affects on predicting the runoff peak. Therefore, the efforts must take into consideration on not only removing radar rainfall error itself but also weakening the cross-correlation structure of radar errors in order to forecast flood events more accurately.

Acknowledgements

This research was supported by a grant from a Strategic Research Project (Development of Flood Warning and Snowfall Estimation Platform Using Hydrological Radars), which was funded by the Korea Institute of Construction Technology. The first author also acknowledges that he was supported for this work by the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) grant funded by the Korean government (MEST) (2015R1A1A1A05001007)