• Journal of Korea Water Resources Association
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• v.43 no.12
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• pp.1083-1091
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• 2010

Distributed hydrologic models typically require spatial estimates of precipitation interpolated from sparsely located observational points to the specific grid points. However, widely used estimation schemes fail to describe the realistic variability of daily precipitation field. We compare and contrast the performance of statistical methods for the spatial estimation of precipitation in two hydrologically different basins, and propose a two-step process for effective daily precipitation estimation. The methods assessed are: (1) Inverse Distance Weighted Average (IDW); (2) Multiple Linear Regression (MLR); (3) Climatological MLR; and (4) Locally Weighted Polynomial Regression (LWP). In the suggested simple two-step estimation process, precipitation occurrence is first generated via a logistic regression model before applying IDW scheme (one of the local scheme) to estimate the amount of precipitation separately on wet days. As the results, the suggested method shows the better performance of daily rainfall interpolation which has spatial differences compared with conventional methods. And this technique can be used for streamflow forecasting and downscaling of atmospheric circulation model effectively.