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A non‐homogeneous hidden Markov model for precipitation occurrence
Author(s) -
Hughes J. P.,
Guttorp P,
Charles S. P.
Publication year - 1999
Publication title -
journal of the royal statistical society: series c (applied statistics)
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.205
H-Index - 72
eISSN - 1467-9876
pISSN - 0035-9254
DOI - 10.1111/1467-9876.00136
Subject(s) - downscaling , precipitation , homogeneous , climatology , rain gauge , environmental science , atmospheric circulation , scale (ratio) , meteorology , general circulation model , markov model , markov chain , geography , climate change , mathematics , statistics , geology , cartography , combinatorics , oceanography
A non‐homogeneous hidden Markov model is proposed for relating precipitation occurrences at multiple rain‐gauge stations to broad scale atmospheric circulation patterns (the so‐called ‘downscaling problem’). We model a 15‐year sequence of winter data from 30 rain stations in south‐western Australia. The first 10 years of data are used for model development and the remaining 5 years are used for model evaluation. The fitted model accurately reproduces the observed rainfall statistics in the reserved data despite a shift in atmospheric circulation (and, consequently, rainfall) between the two periods. The fitted model also provides some useful insights into the processes driving rainfall in this region.