Stochastic Generation of Daily Rainfall, in Kavala City Station, North-Eastern Greece

• Published in: Procedia engineering 2016, Vol.162, p.162-171
• Main Authors: Papalaskaris, Thomas, Panagiotidis, Theologos, Papadopoulos, Sotirios, Pantrakis, Athanasios
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: artificial rainfall time series generation; hidden Markov chains models; rainfall episode existence; Stochastic process; two parameters gamma probability distribution
• ISSN: 1877-7058; 1877-7058
• DOI: 10.1016/j.proeng.2016.11.032

The importance of precipitation data acquisition and analysis in order to forecast several parts of climate patterns and profoundly intemperate events related to hydrological processes, (e.g. floods and droughts), has been significantly acknowledged by the involved scientific as well as governmental organizations, societies and authorities (e.g. meteorological, hydrological, agricultural, civil protection) worldwide. Focusing on the Mediterranean Basin, and especially Greece, there have been a lot of extreme rainfall events so far, which in association with the considerably steep orography of the Mediterranean Basin landscape unavoidably resulted to flash flooding phenomena and in addition in some cases with sequential debris-flows. The study area of the present research is the Kavala city in Kavala prefecture, North-Eastern Greece, North-Eastern Mediterranean Basin, where, a single, private meteorological station has been operating in Kavala city (Dexameni area), since the beginning of December 2005. The two most important aims which this present specific research concentrates are concluded as following: (i) to create a stochastic rainfall model dealing with the wet day episode existence and daily rainfall depth, and (ii) to produce total accumulated daily rainfall bulk depths (thus consequently daily, monthly and yearly artificial rainfall time series) by means of the two-parameters (α,β) Gamma distribution (the model parameters values were calculated based on past rainfall measurements). For this present specific research purposes, Gamma rainfall distribution function is used, aiming to constitute the powerful tool which most perfectly fits the so far recorded daily rainfall data distribution in Kavala city area.