The Effect of Station Density and Regional Division on Spatial Distribution of Daily Rainfall

Rainfall is one of the most important climatic variables in the hydrology cycle. In flood estimation as well as environmental pollution studies in medium to large watersheds not only mus temporal pattern of rainfall t be known, but also the knowledge of its spatial distribution is required. Estimation of daily rainfall distribution without comparison and selection of suitable methods may lead to errors in input parameters of rainfall – runoff models. Interpolation methods are among the techniques for estimating spatial distribution of rainfall. In this study, Thin Plate Smoothing Splines (TPSS), Weighted Moving Average (WMA) and Kriging are applied to estimate spatial daily rainfall in the southwest of Iran. Cross validation technique is used for comparison and evaluation of the methods. The results of analysis with two different station density showed that the TPSS method with power of 2 is the most accurate method in estimating daily rainfall. Zoning of the region also increased the interpolation accuracy. Generally speaking, division of the region based on cluster analysis improves accuracy compared with division by inter basin boundaries