Mark A. Ayers

Simulation of precipitation by weather type analysis

A method of precipitation simulation that incorporates climatological information has been developed. A Markovian-based model is used to generate temporal sequences of six daily weather types: high pressure; coastal return; maritime tropical return; frontal maritime tropical return; cold frontal overrunning; and warm frontal overrunning. Precipitation values are assigned to individual days by using observed statistical relations between weather types and precipitation characteristics. When this method was applied to an area in the Delaware River basin, the statistics describing average precipitation, extreme precipitation, and drought conditions for simulated precipitation closely matched those of the observed data. Potential applications of this weather type precipitation model include climatic change research and modeling of temperature and evapotranspiration.