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research article

Influence of small scale rainfall variability on standard comparison tools between radar and rain gauge data

Gires, A.
•
Tchiguirinskaia, I.
•
Schertzer, D.
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2014
Atmospheric Research

Rain gauges and weather radars do not measure rainfall at the same scale; roughly 20 cm for the former and 1 km for the latter. This significant scale gap is not taken into account by standard comparison tools (e.g. cumulative depth curves, normalized bias, RMSE) despite the fact that rainfall is recognized to exhibit extreme variability at all scales. In this paper we suggest to revisit the debate of the representativeness of point measurement by explicitly modelling small scale rainfall variability with the help of Universal Multifractals. First the downscaling process is validated with the help of a dense networks of 16 disdrometers (in Lausanne, Switzerland), and one of 16 rain gauges (Bradford, United Kingdom) both located within a 1 km2 area. Second this downscaling process is used to evaluate the impact of small scale (i.e.: sub - radar pixel) rainfall variability on the standard indicators. This is done with rainfall data from the Seine-Saint-Denis County (France). Although not explaining all the observed differences, it appears that this impact is significant which suggests changing some usual practice.

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Type
research article
DOI
10.1016/j.atmosres.2013.11.008
Web of Science ID

WOS:000333504300010

Author(s)
Gires, A.
Tchiguirinskaia, I.
Schertzer, D.
Schellart, A.
Berne, A.  
Lovejoy, S.
Date Issued

2014

Publisher

Elsevier

Published in
Atmospheric Research
Issue

138

Start page

125

End page

138

Subjects

radar

•

rainfall

•

rain gauge data

Editorial or Peer reviewed

REVIEWED

Written at

EPFL

EPFL units
LTE  
Available on Infoscience
January 13, 2014
Use this identifier to reference this record
https://infoscience.epfl.ch/handle/20.500.14299/99486
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