Autocorrelation structure of convective rainfall in semiarid-arid climate derived from high-resolution X-Band radar estimates

Francesco Marra*, Efrat Morin

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

45 Scopus citations

Abstract

Small scale rainfall variability is a key factor driving runoff response in fast responding systems, such as mountainous, urban and arid catchments. In this paper, the spatial–temporal autocorrelation structure of convective rainfall is derived with extremely high resolutions (60 m, 1 min) using estimates from an X-Band weather radar recently installed in a semiarid-arid area. The 2-dimensional spatial autocorrelation of convective rainfall fields and the temporal autocorrelation of point-wise and distributed rainfall fields are examined. The autocorrelation structures are characterized by spatial anisotropy, correlation distances ~ 1.5–2.8 km and rarely exceeding 5 km, and time-correlation distances ~ 1.8–6.4 min and rarely exceeding 10 min. The observed spatial variability is expected to negatively affect estimates from rain gauges and microwave links rather than satellite and C-/S-Band radars; conversely, the temporal variability is expected to negatively affect remote sensing estimates rather than rain gauges. The presented results provide quantitative information for stochastic weather generators, cloud-resolving models, dryland hydrologic and agricultural models, and multi-sensor merging techniques.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)126-138
Number of pages13
JournalAtmospheric Research
Volume200
DOIs
StatePublished - 1 Feb 2018

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2017 Elsevier B.V.

Keywords

  • Autocorrelation
  • Convective rainfall
  • Semiarid, arid climate
  • X-Band weather radar

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