Spatiotemporal monthly rainfall forecasts for south-eastern and eastern Australia using climatic indices

Knowledge about future rainfall is important for agriculture management and planning in arid and semi-arid regions. Australia has complex variations in rainfall patterns in time and space, arising from the combination of the geographic structure and the dual effects of Indian and Pacific Ocean. This study aims to develop a forecasting model of spatiotemporal monthly rainfall totals using lagged climate indices and historical rainfall data from 1950-2011 for south-eastern and eastern Australia. Data were obtained from the Australian Bureau of Meteorology (BoM) from 136 high-quality weather stations. To reduce spatial complexity, climate regionalization was used to divide the stations in homogenous sub-regions based on similarity of rainfall patterns and intensity using principal component analysis (PCA) and K-means clustering. Subsequently, a fuzzy ranking algorithm (FRA) was applied to the lagged climatic predictors and monthly rainfall in each sub-region to identify the best predictors. Selected predictors by FRA were found to vary by sub-region. After these two stages of pre-processing, an artificial neural network (ANN) model was developed and optimized separately for each sub-region and the entire area. The results indicate that climate regionalization can improve a monthly spatiotemporal rainfall forecast model. The location and number of sub-regions were important for ranking predictors and modeling. This further suggests that the impact of climate variables on Australian rainfall is more variable in both time and space than indicated thus far.