New Rainfall Missing Values Estimation Proposal: Normal Ratio with Additive Correlation

Abstract

Rainfall is one of the most essential climatological variables for developing hydrological balances, as with other studies. In Mexico, there is a lack of reliable and spatially homogeneous historical information. This study evaluates a proposal to estimate missing data in rainfall time series incorporating a correlation between rain gauge stations using the Normal Ratio as a basis. We used records from eight rain gauge stations over the Chicayan River basin in the Panuco River basin in northern Veracruz. We compared the results of the proposed imputation technique against those obtained with the Normal Ratio, and we found several similarities. Having for both techniques in all rain gauge stations values above 0.88 for R² and values above 0.94 for r. The RMSE and MAE were also analysed, and we found that both yield very close values.