Spatiotemporal Modeling and Implementation for Radar-Based Rainfall Estimation

Radar-based rainfall estimation is one of the most important inputs for various meteorological applications. Although exciting progresses have been made in this area, accurate real-time rainfall estimation is still a significant opening topic that requires practical modeling. The research study presented in this letter improves rainfall estimation accuracy by proposing a random forest and linear chain conditional random-field-based spatiotemporal model (RANLIST). To apply this model for rainfall estimation, the implementing approach is presented. The advantages are listed as follows: 1) RANLIST improves rainfall estimation accuracy by exploiting both underlying local spatial structure of multiple radar reflectivity factors and time-series information of rain processes. 2) The time-series information of rain processes can be utilized in virtue of the presented implementation method. Experiments have been carried out over the radar-covered area of Quanzhou, China, in June and July 2014. Results show that RANLIST is superior to previous works.