Mapping Extreme Rainfall in a Mountainous Region Using Geostatistical Techniques: a Case Study in Scotland

The spatial pattern of precipitation is known to be highly dependent on meteorological conditions and relief. However, the relationships between precipitation and topography in mountainous areas are not very well known, partly because of the complex topography in these regions, and partly because of the sparsity of information available to study such relationships in high elevation areas. The purpose of the investigation was to find a method of mapping extreme rainfall in the mountainous region of Scotland, which was easy to use and to understand, and which gave satisfactory results both in terms of statistical performance and consistency with meteorological mechanisms. Among the interpolation methods described in the literature, ordinary kriging and modified residual kriging have been found attractive by reason of their simplicity and ease of use. Both methods have been applied to map an index of extreme rainfall, the median of the annual maximum daily rainfall (RMED), in the mountainous region of Scotland. Rainfall records from a network of 1003 raingauges are used, covering Scotland with uneven density. A 4-parameter regression equation developed in a previous study, relating a transformed variable of RMED to topographical variables, is used in the modified residual kriging method. Comparing the relative performances of ordinary kriging and modified residual kriging shows that the use of topographical information helps to compensate for the lack of local data from which any interpolation method, such as ordinary kriging, might suffer, thus improving the final mapping. Copyright © 1999 Royal Meteorological Society.