Interpolating intraday precipitation data with radar background information

It is a common phenomenon that a small but significant precipitation cell or supercell passes between two measuring stations, resulting in an inadequate record of the daily precipitation amounts of up to 100 mm falling on a small area between the measurements and observations. This renders the interpolation from measurements alone insufficient to provide a complete depiction of the actual weather conditions. Therefore, to reduce the deviations from the actual weather situation, supplementary background information, for instance satellite data series, forecast information or radar measurements is used. In many cases, heavy thunderstorms with high rainfall can cause flash floods, which have a number of known negative effects in both social and agricultural areas. To achieve more accurate interpolation, it is therefore essential to use radar background information, as it yields significant social and agricultural benefits and can even be used for hazard warning. As the annual, seasonal and daily precipitation sum data series are interpolated using the MISH software at the OMSZ (Hungarian Meteorological Service) Unit of Climatology, the 10-minute, hourly, etc. precipitation sums are also interpolated using the MISH system. MISH software incorporates background information automatically and produce verification statistics. In our presentation, we will not only illustrate the theoretical and practical application of the MISH software, but also provide an overview of these statistics. The data series were interpolated by MISH for the whole area of Hungary, with and without radar background information, and statistical methods were used to illustrate the extent to which the interpolation was improved by the radar product used as background, and the strong relationship between interpolation with and without background information.

Acknowledgement:

The research presented in the article was carried out within the framework of the Széchenyi Plan Plus program with the support of the RRF 2.3.1 21 2022 00008 project.