Spatio-temporal precipitation modelling in rural watersheds

Abstract

The paper develops a three-stage iterative procedure for building a Space-Time Autoregressive Moving Average (STARMA) model of multiple precipitation series. The identified model is STMA (13). The emphasis is placed on the three stages of the model building procedure, namely identification, parameter estimation and diagnostic checking. In the parameter estimation stage the polytope (or simplex) method and three further classical nonlinear optimization algorithms are used, namely two conjugate gradient methods and a quasi-Newton method. The polytope method has been adopted and the developed model performed well in describing the spatio-temporal characteristics of the multiple precipitation series. Application has been attempted in a rural watershed in southern Canada. -from Authors