Application of information fusion techniques and satellite products in the optimal redesign of rain gauge networks

Rain gauge networks are usually redesigned to improve the accuracy of spatial and temporal estimates and reduce the monitoring costs. In addition to the rain-gauge data, satellite-based data can be used for the optimal redesign of rainfall monitoring networks. Despite high spatial and temporal resolutions of products of meteorological satellites, they must be calibrated using ground-based data. In this paper, a new methodology is presented for an optimal redesign of rain-gauge networks. In this methodology, after the bias correction of some satellite-based rainfall products (i.e., PERSIANN-CCS, TRMM3B42RTV7, and CMORPH), they are combined using a Bayesian information fusion technique. The spatiotemporal rainfall maps, which are developed using the fusion model, are used in an optimization model. The optimization model provides the optimal locations of the rain-gauge stations, considering the objectives of minimizing both the monitoring cost and the average standard deviation of estimation errors. To illustrate the applicability and efficiency of the proposed methodology, it is applied to the Khorasan Razavi Province in Iran. The results show that by using the satellite data and the Bayesian information fusion technique, the summation of standard deviations of estimation errors is significantly reduced from 18,787.9 to 778.28 mm.