Ma et al. (2026) Interpolation Strategy Selection for Areal Rainfall Estimation in an Extremely Sparse-Gauge Small Catchment: An Event-Scale Comparison Using Gauge and Radar References

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Identification

• Journal: Hydrology
• Year: 2026
• Date: 2026-09-11
• Authors: Yongli Ma, Cheng Chen, Furong Xu, Haigang Li, Xiaojun Zhang, Yanzhi Liu, Qinghui Jiang, Xiaobo Zhang
• DOI: 10.3390/hydrology13090245

Research Groups

• Department of Hydrology
• Institute of Geophysics
• Center for Climate Modeling

Short Summary

This study compares six methods for estimating areal rainfall in a small catchment with sparse gauge networks, finding that multiple linear regression and multi-layer perceptron produce similar results when using the complete gauge network.

Objective

• Investigate the performance of different interpolation methods for areal rainfall estimation in small catchments with extremely sparse gauge networks

Study Configuration

• Spatial Scale: 0.719 km2 catchment
• Temporal Scale: Event-scale study, focusing on a 60 h event

Methodology and Data

• Models used:
  • Arithmetic mean (AM)
  • Thiessen polygon (TP)
  • Inverse distance weighting (IDW)
  • Precipitation–elevation linear regression (ELR)
  • Multiple linear regression (MLR)
  • Multi-layer perceptron (MLP)
• Data sources: Three gauges, radar reference

Main Results

• Multiple linear regression produced the lowest leave-one-out cross-validation error (RMSE = 0.433 mm; CC = 0.777)
• In the radar comparison, multi-layer perceptron and multiple linear regression produced nearly identical RMSE values of 0.668 and 0.669 mm, respectively

Contributions

• This study demonstrates that station-omission performance and full-network areal estimation address different operational questions, highlighting the need to consider both when selecting an interpolation method for extremely sparse networks.

Funding

• Not specified in the paper

Citation

@article{Ma2026Interpolation,
  author = {Ma, Yongli and Chen, Cheng and Xu, Furong and Li, Haigang and Zhang, Xiaojun and Liu, Yanzhi and Jiang, Qinghui and Zhang, Xiaobo},
  title = {Interpolation Strategy Selection for Areal Rainfall Estimation in an Extremely Sparse-Gauge Small Catchment: An Event-Scale Comparison Using Gauge and Radar References},
  journal = {Hydrology},
  year = {2026},
  doi = {10.3390/hydrology13090245},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.3390/hydrology13090245}
}