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A rule based quality control method for hourly rainfall data and a 1 km resolution gridded hourly rainfall dataset for Great Britain: CEH-GEAR1hr

Lookup NU author(s): Dr Elizabeth Lewis, Dr Stephen Blenkinsop, Professor Hayley Fowler

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).

Abstract

AbstractHigh-resolution gridded precipitation products are rare globally, particularly below a daily time-step, yet many hydrological applications require, or can be improved by, a higher temporal resolution of rainfall data. Here, we present a new 1 km resolution gridded hourly rainfall dataset for Great Britain (Gridded estimates of hourly areal rainfall for Great Britain (1990–2014) [CEH-GEAR1hr]) using data from over 1900 quality controlled rainfall gauges, which improves upon the current UK national gridded precipitation datasets at daily time-step. We extend and automate a quality control (QC) procedure to permit the use of hourly data for 1990–2014 and independently validate the QC using daily rainfall data and recorded historic events. Our two-tiered validation approach, at daily and hourly timescales, indicates that spurious extreme values are excluded from the resultant dataset, while legitimate values are preserved. We use a nearest neighbour interpolation scheme to derive gridded hourly rainfall values at 1 km resolution, to temporally disaggregate the CEH-GEAR daily gridded dataset and produce an hourly dataset with consistent daily totals. This provides a unique resource for hydrological applications in Great Britain. The CEH-GEAR1hr dataset, associated metadata and QC information, will be freely available from the Environmental Information Data Centre (EIDC) and hosted alongside the daily and monthly CEH-GEAR product.

Publication metadata

Author(s): Lewis E, Quinn N, Blenkinsop S, Fowler HJ, Freer J, Tanguy M, Hitt O, Coxon G, Bates P, Woods R

Publication type: Article

Publication status: Published

Journal: Journal of Hydrology

Year: 2018

Volume: 564

Pages: 930-943

Print publication date: 01/09/2018

Online publication date: 20/07/2018

Acceptance date: 14/07/2018

Date deposited: 09/08/2018

ISSN (print): 0022-1694

Publisher: Elsevier

URL: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhydrol.2018.07.034

DOI: 10.1016/j.jhydrol.2018.07.034

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