Improved Weather Generator Algorithm for Multisite Simulation of Precipitation and Temperature

• Published in: Journal of the American Water Resources Association Vol. 51; no. 5; pp. 1305 - 1320
• Main Authors: King, Leanna M., McLeod, A. Ian, Simonovic, Slobodan P.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Middleburg Blackwell Publishing Ltd 01.10.2015
• Subjects: Algorithms; climate; Climatology; Computer simulation; Correlation; Freshwater; Generators; Historic; Hydrologic data; Precipitation; River basins; Simulation; stochastic; Temperature; Weather; weather generator; Ontario Canada; Canada; Canada, Ontario
• ISSN: 1093-474X; 1752-1688
• DOI: 10.1111/1752-1688.12307

The KnnCAD Version 4 weather generator algorithm for nonparametric, multisite simulations of temperature and precipitation data is presented. The K‐nearest neighbor weather generator essentially reshuffles the historical data, with replacement. In KnnCAD Version 4, a block resampling scheme is introduced to preserve the temporal correlation structure in temperature data. Perturbation of the reshuffled variable data is also added to enhance the generation of extreme values. The Upper Thames River Basin in Ontario, Canada is used as a case study and the model is shown to simulate effectively the historical characteristics at the site. The KnnCAD Version 4 approach is shown to improve on the previous versions of the model and offers a major advantage over many parametric and semiparametric weather generators in that multisite use can be easily achieved without making statistical assumptions dealing with the spatial correlations and probability distributions of each variable.