Proposal of a new rainfall product using modified weather radar data published by the Thai Meteorological Department and its application: a case study in Thailand

Kota Tsuzuki, Shunta Nakamura, Taichi Tebakari, Kazuhiro Yoshimi
Received 14 March, 2024
Accepted 22 August, 2024
Published online 14 February, 2025

Kota Tsuzuki1), Shunta Nakamura2), Taichi Tebakari3), Kazuhiro Yoshimi4)

1) Civil, Human and Environmental Science and Engineering Course, Graduate School of Science and Engineering, Chuo University, Japan
2) Kajima Corporation, Japan
3) Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Chuo University, Japan
4) Department of Environmental and Civil Engineering, Toyama Prefectural University, Japan

Weather radar can observe rainfall over wide areas with higher spatial and temporal resolution than other observation methods. The Thai Meteorological Department (TMD) has installed ground rainfall stations throughout Thailand to monitor rainfall but the number of these stations is insufficient. The TMD has also installed weather radar systems but their data quality is deficient due to frequent spatiotemporal errors. In this study, we evaluate the usefulness of TMD weather radar data that include spatiotemporal errors and propose a new spatiotemporal interpolation method to address the problem of missing data. A new hybrid rainfall product for runoff analysis was constructed through the temporal interpolation of radar data based on substituting ground rainfall data for missing data and the spatial interpolation of data based on inverse distance weighting. Runoff analyses showed that the hybrid rainfall product reproduced the observed discharge more accurately than ground rainfall data, demonstrating the high applicability of the proposed product.

[Full Text]

Copyright (c) 2025 The Author(s) CC-BY 4.0

Back to Top ↑