A New Approach for Rainfall Rate Field Space-Time Interpolation for Western Europe

Abstract. The prediction of rainfall rate characteristics at small space-time scales is currently an important topic, particularly within the context of the planning and design of satellite network systems. A new comprehensive interpolation approach is presented in this paper to deal with such an issue. There are three novelties in the proposed approach: (1) the proposed interpolation approach is not directly applied to measured rain precipitation (either radar or raingauge-derived data) but focuses on the coefficients of the fitted statistical distributions and/or computed rain characteristics at each location; (2) the parameter databases are provided and the contour maps of coefficients spanning Western Europe have been created. It conveniently and efficiently provides the rain parameter for any location within the studied map; (3) more speculatively, the 3D space-time interpolation approach can extrapolate to rain parameters at space-time resolutions shorter than those in the NIMROD databases.