Rainfall is arguably the most frequently measured hydro-meteorological variable. It is a required input for many hydrological applications like runoff computations, flood forecasting as well as engineering design of structures. However, rainfall data in its raw form contain many gaps and inconsistent values. Therefore it is important to do rigorous validation of rain-gauge observation before incorporating them into analysis.
World Bank’s National Hydrology Project (NHP) prescribes a set of primary and secondary validation methods in the Manual of Rainfall Data Validation.
Of particular interest to me are the spatial methods aimed to identify suspect values by comparison with neighboring stations. This spatial homogeneity test requires complex spatial and statistical data processing that can be quite challenging. I got an opportunity to work on a project that required automating the entire process of identifying and testing suspect stations. I ended up implementing it in QGIS using just Expressions and Processing Modeler. The whole solution required no custom code and was easily usable by an analyst in the QGIS environment. In this post, I will explain the details of the test and show you how you can use similar techniques for your own analysis.
This workflow was presented as a live session on QGIS Open Day. You can watch the recording to understand the concepts and implementation.
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