Evaluation of spatial–temporal characteristics of precipitation using discrete maximal overlap wavelet transform and spatial clustering tools

Abstract

Abstract In the present study, classical and proposed methods were used to investigate the monthly precipitation characteristics of 30 stations in the southeastern United States during 1968–2018. Maximal overlap discrete wavelet transform (MODWT) as preprocessing method and K-means clustering method were used. First, the monthly precipitation time series of stations were decomposed into several subseries using MODWT and considering db as the mother wavelet. Then, the energy values of theses subseries were calculated and used as inputs in K-means and radial basis functions (RBF) methods. The optimum number of clusters obtained for the considered stations in both classical and proposed methods was five clusters. In order to use the data as the input of the RBF method, the data correlation was evaluated by variogram. Based on the results of clustering and in accordance with the latitude and longitude variations of the stations, it was found that with increasing the energy of the clusters, the amount of precipitation in the stations decreased and vice versa. The silhouette coefficient of clustering for the classical method obtained was 0.3 and for the proposed method it was 0.8, which indicates better clustering of the selected area using the proposed method.