Improvement of Spatial Interpolation of Precipitation Distribution Using Cokriging Incorporating Rain-Gauge and Satellite (SMOS) Soil Moisture Data

Abstract

Precipitation data provide a crucial input for examining hydrological issues, including watershed management and mitigation of the effects of floods, drought, and landslides. However, they are collected frequently from the scarce and often insufficient network of ground-based rain-gauge stations to generate continuous precipitation maps. Recently, precipitation maps derived from satellite data have not been sufficiently linked to ground-based rain gauges and satellite-derived soil moisture to improve the assessment of precipitation distribution using spatial statistics. Kriging methods are used to enhance the estimation of the spatial distribution of precipitations. The aim of this study was to assess two geostatistical methods, ordinary kriging (OK) and ordinary cokriging (OCK), and one deterministic method (i.e., inverse distance weighting (IDW)) for improved spatial interpolation of quarterly and monthly precipitations in Poland and near-border areas of the neighbouring countries (~325,000 or 800,000 km2). Quarterly precipitation data collected during a 5-year period (2010–2014) from 113–116 rain-gauge stations located in the study area were used. Additionally, monthly precipitations in the years 2014–2017 from over 400 rain-gauge stations located in Poland were used. The spatiotemporal data on soil moisture (SM) from the Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) global satellite (launched in 2009) were used as an auxiliary variable in addition to precipitation for the OCK method. The predictive performance of the spatial distribution of precipitations was the best for OCK for all quarters, as indicated by the coefficient of determination (R2 = 0.944–0.992), and was less efficient (R2 = 0.039–0.634) for the OK and IDW methods. As for monthly precipitation, the performance of OCK was considerably higher than that of IDW and OK, similarly as with quarterly precipitation. The performance of all interpolation methods was better for monthly than for quarterly precipitations. The study indicates that SMOS data can be a valuable source of auxiliary data in the cokriging and/or other multivariate methods for better estimation of the spatial distribution of precipitations in various regions of the world.