Author(s)

Athanasios K. Margaritidis

Faculty of Agriculture, Forestry and Natural Environment, School of Agriculture, Department of Hydraulics, Soil Science & Agriculture Engineering, Thessaloniki, Greece.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the spatial interpolation of rainfall variability with deterministic and geostatic inspections in the Prefecture of Kilkis (Greece). The precipitation data where recorded from 12 meteorological stations in the Prefecture of Kilkis for 36 hydrological years (1973-2008). The cumulative monthly values of rainfall were studied on an annual and seasonal basis as well as during the arid-dry season. In the deterministic tests, the I.D.W. and R.B.F. checks were inspected, while in the geostatic tests, Ordinary Kriging and Universal Kriging respectively. The selection of the optimum method was made based on the least Root Mean Square Error (R.M.S.E.), as well as on the Mean Error (M.E.), as assessed by the cross validation analysis. The geostatical Kriging also considered the impact of isotropy and anisotropy across all time periods of data collection. Moreover, for Universal Kriging, the study explored spherical, exponential and Gaussian models in various combinations. Geostatistical techniques consistently demonstrated greater reliability than deterministic techniques across all time periods of data collection. Specifically, during the annual period, anisotropy was the prevailing characteristic in geostatistical techniques. Moreover, the results for the irrigation and seasonal periods were generally comparable, with few exceptions where isotropic methods yielded lower (R.M.S.E.) in some seasonal observations.

Interpolation, Kriging, I.D.W., Precipitation, Greece

Margaritidis, A. (2024) Comparison of Spatial Interpolation Methods of Precipitation Data in Central Macedonia, Greece. Computational Water, Energy, and Environmental Engineering, 13, 13-37. doi: 10.4236/cweee.2024.131002.