pyRCIT - A rainfall nowcasting tool based on a synthetic approach
- 1Information Center(Hydrology Monitor and Forecast Center), Ministry of Water Resources of the People's Republic of China, Beijing, China (heting@mwr.gov.cn)
- 2Hydro & Meteo GmbH & Co. KG, Luebeck, Germany (einfalt@hydrometeo.de)
Operating precise rainfall nowcasting with the help of observations from weather radar can give an effective warning before hydrometerological hazards occur. A common radar based rainfall nowcasting procedure includes: rain cell identification and tracking, spatial and temporal analysis of rain cell, rainfall nowcasting and nowcasting results evaluation.
In this study, an open source rainfall nowcasting tool - pyRCIT is designed and developed which is purely based on qualified weather radar data. It have four main modules: (1) weather radar data processing; (2) rainfall spatial and temporal analysis; (3) deterministic rainfall nowcasting and (4) ensemble rainfall nowcasting. In pyRCIT, rainfall is firstly obtained from weather radar data sets with a series of data quality adjustment procedures. Secondly, rain cells are identified and their spatial and temporal properties are analyzed by the RCIT algorithm. Thirdly, deterministic rainfall nowcasting is operated following the extrapolating schema using lagrangian persistence and semi-lagrangian methods separately, nowcasting results are evaluated by the object oriented verification method - SAL (Structure-Amplitude-Location). Finally, nowcasting uncertainties are analyzed by the random field theory and the quantified uncertainties are implemented as the aid of ensemble rainfall nowcasting.
Nowcasting quality of pyRCIT are evaluated by comparing it with some main rainfall nowcasting methods: TREC, SCOUT and pySTEPS. Comparative results showed that deterministic nowcasting score of pyRCIT were higher than the TREC and SCOUT methods but is nearly equal to the score of pySTEPS, for the ensemble nowcasting, score of pyRCIT is higher than all three methods for the selected cases. The pyRCIT can serve as the basis for further hydro-meteorological applications such as spatial and temporal analysis of rainfall events and flash flood forecasting.
The code of pyRCIT is available at https://github.com/greensubriane/PYRCIT.git
How to cite: He, T. and Einfalt, T.: pyRCIT - A rainfall nowcasting tool based on a synthetic approach, EGU General Assembly 2023, Vienna, Austria, 24–28 Apr 2023, EGU23-2493, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu23-2493, 2023.
