Journal of Hydrology 583 (2020) 124584

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Journal of Hydrology
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Research papers

Spatial-temporal rain field generation for the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macau T

Greater Bay Area considering climate change
Yejia Qianga,b, Limin Zhanga,b, , Te Xiaoa,b
⁎

a
Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong, China
b
HKUST Shenzhen Research Institute, Shenzhen, China

ARTICLE INFO ABSTRACT

This manuscript was handled by G. Syme, A stochastic rainfall generator is required to provide rainfall inputs for the analysis and mitigation of such
Editor-in-Chief hydrological or geologic hazards as floods and rain-induced landslides. This paper presents a new spatial-tem-
Keywords: poral rainstorm generator for generating simultaneous rainfall processes at numerous locations considering the
Spatial-temporal rain field generator spatial correlation among these locations and interpolating the point processes into an areal rain field. The
Rainstorm generator is able to include the effect of climate change by adjusting the parameters of the marginal distributions
Climate change of variables constituting rainfall events. A case study on the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macau Greater Bay Area
Natural hazards (GBA), one of the regions that are most prone to storm-related disasters in the world, is presented. The per-
Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macau Greater Bay Area
formance of the proposed generator is excellent in reproducing the historical statistical characteristics of re-
Flooding
gional rainfall. The model is adapted to climate change through extrapolation of the variation trend of the model
parameters in the observation period to explore possible future scenarios of regional rainfall in GBA. The si-
mulation results indicate a significant increase in rainfall extremes, especially for short-duration rainfall, at the
end of 21st century in GBA.

1. Introduction
The Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macau Greater Bay Area (GBA) (Fig. 1)
is a very densely populated metropolitan area consisting of 11 cities,
including Hong Kong, Macau, Guangzhou and Shenzhen. It is one of the
regions with the strongest economic vitality in China. However, GBA is
one of the most disaster-prone regions in the world, and frequently
suffers storm-related hazards (Swiss Re, 2013; Hallegatte et al., 2013).
According to Swiss Re (2013), GBA is the world’s most flood-exposed
urban area, ranking first among major metropolitan areas around the
world, with around 12 million people potentially affected. Intense
rainstorms are one of the major triggers of hydrological or geologic
hazards, such as floods (Wright et al., 2014; Gao et al., 2019), landslides
(Chen and Zhang, 2014; Ran et al., 2018; Gao et al., 2018b), debris
flows (Chen et al., 2016; Iadanza et al., 2016; Shen et al., 2018; Zhou
et al., 2019), etc. The risks of storm-related hazards are likely to become
higher in GBA in the future as a result of potentially more frequent and
intense rainstorms. Due to global warming, the capacity of the atmo-
sphere to hold moisture will enhance, which implies that extreme
rainstorms will increase in terms of both frequency and intensity. In
South China, a remarkable increasing trend in rainfall intensity and
rainfall amount from extreme events is found in the Pearl River Basin
from analysis of historical daily precipitation data (Zhang et al., 2009).
Projections of heavy rainfall events from general circulation models of
the Fourth Assessment Report released by Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change indicate a substantial increase in heavy rainfall fre-
quency (35.9–50.2% increase over that in the period of 1980–1999)
and intensity (2.8–6.4% increase over that in the period of 1980–1999)
in South China at the end of 21st century (Chen et al., 2012).
Apart from the total rainfall amount, the spatial-temporal variation
of rainfall will also affect the response of hydrogeological systems by
affecting the soil moisture, groundwater level and discharge of catch-
ments (Schuurmans and Bierkens, 2007; Zhu et al., 2018). To in-
vestigate the hazards related to rainfall, it is necessary to project future
regional rainstorm scenarios for engineering design and hazard pre-
vention purposes, considering the trend of climate change. Stochastic
rainfall simulation models can be used to generate continuous rainfall
processes to provide input for hazard investigation. Stochastic simula-
tion of spatial-temporal process of rainfall is challenging due to its in-
termittency and the spatial-temporal cross-correlation. The inter-
mittency characteristics of rainfall can be modelled by describing
rainfall occurrence and rainfall intensity separately. For rainfall oc-
currence, based on point rainfall observations, simple models for gen-
erating point synthetic rainfall sequences have been developed, such as

⁎
Corresponding author at: Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong, China.
E-mail addresses: yqiang@connect.ust.hk (Y. Qiang), cezhangl@ust.hk (L. Zhang), xiaote@ust.hk (T. Xiao).

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhydrol.2020.124584
Received 9 October 2019; Received in revised form 11 December 2019; Accepted 13 January 2020
Available online 20 January 2020
0022-1694/ © 2020 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Y. Qiang, et al.
Zhaoqing
Guangzhou
Foshan
Zhongshan
Jiangmen
Zhuhai
Fig. 1. The Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macau Greater Bay Area.
the Markov renewal model (Haan et al., 1976; Foufoula-Georgiou and
Lettenmaier, 1987) and the alternating renewal model (Acreman, 1990;
Haberlandt, 1998; Haberlandt et al., 2008). The variation of rainfall
intensity (rainfall pattern) can be modelled with such methods as the
random cascade model (Tang et al., 2018) and the cluster analysis (Wu
et al., 2006). To capture the spatial and temporal characteristics of
rainfall, multisite models are widely used when point observations are
available. For example, Wilks (1998) established a chain dependent
process model for simultaneous simulation of daily precipitation oc-
currences and amounts at multiple locations. Serinaldi (2009) devel-
oped a model based on bivariate copula-based mixed distributions to
generate daily rainfall time series at multiple sites with no need for
separating rainfall occurrence and rainfall amount. In addition to the
multisite models, some models included space-time correlation of rain
events with random field theory. Bell (1987) established a model to
describe the spatial pattern of precipitation by rescaling part of a cor-
related Gaussian random field into a lognormal type. Allcroft and
Glasbey (2003) transformed rainfall to a thresholded Gaussian variable
and modelled the space-time dependence structure as a Gaussian
Markov random field.
The models mentioned above attempt to reproduce the character-
istics of point or regional precipitation. Many of them involve a large
number of parameters and complex estimation processes. Moreover,
how to take climate change into stochastic rainfall simulation models is
still a challenge. To investigate rainfall-triggered hazards in GBA, which
may become more severe in the future, a rain field generator with a
logical structure and the flexibility to include climate change is parti-
cularly necessary.
The primary objective of this paper is to develop a model for gen-
erating spatial-temporal rainfall processes as inputs for hazard analysis,
with its parameters estimated from historical point observations from
rainfall stations and adjustable for the trend of climate change. Section
2 will present the detailed development of the model, followed by
model parameter estimation and adaptation to climate change. The
performance of the model will be validated through a case study in GBA
2
Journal of Hydrology 583 (2020) 124584
Huizhou
Dongguan
Shenzhen
Hong Kong
Macau
Pearl river estuary
with historical data in Section 3, and the possible future variation of
rainfall characteristics in GBA will be systematically investigated in
Section 4. The spatial-temporally varying rain fields produced by the
proposed model can be further applied to large-scale hydrological and
geologic hazard analyses using distributed models, such as rainfall-
runoff-inundation analysis and regional rainfall-induced landslide
analysis, which is beyond the scope of this paper.
2. Spatial-temporal rain field generation considering climate
change
The proposed spatial-temporal rain field generator generates rain-
fall sequences at multiple stations considering the inter-station spatial
correlation. The framework of the generator is shown in Fig. 2.
2.1. Temporal rainfall modelling
The intermittency feature of rainfall can be approximated as an
alternating renewal process (Acreman, 1990; Haberlandt, 1998) which
models a system alternating between two states over time, i.e. raining
or not raining. The occurrence, interval time and rainfall amount can be
characterised by three variables, i.e. wet spell duration (W), dry spell
duration (D) and average intensity (I) (Fig. 3). Herein, the wet and dry
spell durations are referred to as the duration of continuous raining (i.e.
the duration of a rainstorm event) and the inter-event duration, re-
spectively. A basic assumption of the alternating renewal process is that
pairs of the two states are independent. When applying the alternating
renewal process in modelling rainfall, all the samples of wet spell and
dry spell durations are often considered to be independent, i.e. the
neighbouring W and D are independent as well (Acreman, 1990;
Haberlandt, 1998). However, the average intensity of rainfall during
each wet spell is not independent of the wet spell duration. The joint
distribution of W and I with the consideration of their correlation can
be described with a two dimensional copula (Nelsen, 2007; Bezak et al.,
2016; Gao et al., 2018a):
Y. Qiang, et al. Journal of Hydrology 583 (2020) 124584

Fig. 2. Schematic diagram of the spatial-temporal rain field generator.

50 exponentially (Haberlandt et al., 2008):

W1 D1 W2 D2 W3 i (t ) = im × e | t tm |
(2)
40
where im = a × ib is the peak instantaneous rainfall intensity during the
wet spell and assumed to be only related to the average rainfall in-
Hourly rainfall (mm)

30 tensity within the wet spell in a power form, in which parameters a and
b can be estimated by regression analysis; tm is the time of peak in-
tensity that is assumed to be uniformly distributed within the wet spell
20 and generated randomly during the simulation; and γ is an event-spe-
cific parameter and can be obtained according to the balance of rainfall
amount:
10 I3 tm w
I1 I2 im × e (t tm) dt + im × e (tm t ) dt = wi
0 tm (3)
0
0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 Once w, i, im and tm have been determined, Eq. (3) can be solved
through the Newton-Raphson method. Even for the same set of W and I,
Time (h)
different simulated values of tm still lead to temporally varying rainfall
Fig. 3. Illustration of a precipitation process. patterns. Combining the event sequences and the simulated rainfall
patterns, a time series of rainfall intensity reflecting the temporal var-
F (w, i) = C [FW (w ), FI (i); ] (1) iation of rainfall can be obtained.

where F(w,i) is the joint cumulative distribution function of W and I;
FW(w) and FI(i) are the marginal cumulative distribution functions of W
and I, respectively; C is the copula function that relates F(w,i) to FW(w)
and FI(i); and θ is the copula parameter representing the dependency.
The marginal distributions of W, D and I can be estimated from his-
torical point observations within the area of interest, and rainfall event
sequences can be produced by assembling sets of the three variables
sampled from the corresponding distributions.
The temporal variation of rainfall intensity within a wet spell can be
simplified as a predefined form of rainfall pattern. Although the rainfall
pattern does have influence on the occurrence and process of rainfall-
triggered hazards, a prescribed pattern form is easier to describe when
the focus is on a relatively long-term rainfall process. For example, the
instantaneous rainfall intensity i(t) within each wet spell duration can
be assumed to increase exponentially first and then decrease
2.2. Rain field generation including multisite spatial correlation
The rain field for a specific area of interest can be described by the
temporal rainfall processes at numerous stations. The time series of
rainfall for each station should be generated at the same time due to the
connection between temporal and spatial variations of rainfall. Under
the assumption that the spatial dependences of W, D and I among sta-
tions are the same (Xiao et al., 2017a; Zhu et al., 2017), the inter-station
spatial correlation can be described with a prescribed spatial correla-
tion function, e.g., a Gaussian correlation function:
= exp[ ( )2]
pq pq (4)
where ρpq is the correlation coefficient of the three variables between
stations p and q; τpq is the separation distance between stations p and q;
and δ is the spatial correlation parameter.

3
Y. Qiang, et al.
With the spatial correlation function, any number of simultaneous
rainfall events at numerous stations can be generated. To generate
rainfall sequences at ns stations, a ns × ns auto-correlation matrix
R = [ρpq] is formed first according to the spatial correlation function.
Then, a ns × 1 correlated standard normal random vector N can be
obtained using the covariance matrix decomposition method (Li et al.,
2016; Zhu et al., 2017):
(5)
N = LU
where L is a lower triangular matrix satisfying Cholesky decomposition
R = LLT; and U is a ns × 1 independent standard normal random
vector. N can be transformed into other types of random vectors ac-
cording to the variable distribution types.
Note that D is independent of W and I, while W and I are cross-
correlated. For one rainfall event, the ns × 1 vectors of D, W and I can
be obtained as follows:
1. Randomly generate ns × 3 potential samples of a standard uni-
formly distributed variable at ns stations, with no dependence
among all the samples.
2. Transform the first column of the potential samples into an in-
dependent standard normally distributed vector UD firstly; then
transform it into a standard normally distributed vector ND with
inter-station spatial correlation according to Eq. (5). The ns × 1
vector of D for ns stations can be obtained by transforming ND to the
selected marginal distribution of D.
3. Transform the last two columns of the potential samples into a pair
of standard uniformly distributed variables obeying a given copula
function with independency among stations.
4. Similar to Step 2, transform the two vectors firstly into two standard
normally distributed vectors UW and UI with spatial independency
among stations, and then into two standard normally distributed
vectors NW and NI with inter-station spatial correlation using Eq.
(5). The wet spell duration series W and average rainfall intensity
series I can then be obtained by transforming NW and NI to the se-
lected marginal distributions of W and I.
Repeatedly performing the above steps, the matrices D, W and I for
ns stations with many realizations of rainfall events can be obtained.
After generating rainfall processes at multiple stations, the areal dis-
tribution of rainfall at each snapshot can then be obtained by spatial
interpolation using kriging (Oliver and Webster, 1990; Xiao et al.,
2017b), for which the parameters of range, sill, and nugget are esti-
mated by fitting the empirical semivariogram with commonly used
theoretical semivariogram models.
2.3. Estimation of model parameters
To generate a rain field, the first step is to select appropriate mar-
ginal and joint distributions for the three variables W, D and I, and to
estimate the marginal distribution parameters and the copula para-
meter. Several candidate parametric distributions and copula models
commonly used in hydroclimate study can be tried to fit the data
samples. The optimal model can be identified according to the Akaike
information criterion (AIC) defined as (Tang et al., 2013; Chen and
Singh, 2018):
AIC = 2k 2 ln L (6)
where k is the number of model parameters; and L is the likelihood
function reflecting the goodness-of-fit and is maximized through max-
imum likelihood estimation. Given a set of candidate models for fitting
the data, the preferred model is the one with the minimum AIC value.
Regarding the rainfall pattern, the parameters in the power form of
peak intensity can be obtained using regression analysis based on the
pairwise data of the peak and average rainfall intensities for every wet
spell.
4
Journal of Hydrology 583 (2020) 124584
Furthermore, the spatial correlation parameter δ for modelling the
inter-station spatial correlation of W, D and I is required. However, δ is
difficult to be directly estimated from observations. Instead, it can be
determined by minimizing the difference of a simultaneous rainfall
feature between the generated rainfall and the observed rainfall. In this
paper, the simultaneous rainfall feature is described by the correlation
coefficients of the instantaneous rainfall intensity (ρI) (approximated as
the cumulative rainfall depth in a short period of time) between dif-
ferent stations when rainfall occurs simultaneously. Given the marginal
distributions of W, D and I as well as the dependency between W and I,
the decay trend of the correlation coefficient against the separation
distance between rainfall generation stations (τ) varies as the spatial
correlation parameter δ changes. For simplicity, the pairs of stations are
grouped into several lag bins according to seperation distances, and the
difference of the decay trends between the generated and observed
rainfall is quantified by an objective index Δ:
( )= wj | I ( j ) I* ( j | )|
j (7)
where τj is the mean separation distance of pairs of stations in the jth lag
bin; ρI(τj) is the mean value of ρI in the jth lag bin obtained from ob-
servation data; ρI*(τj|δ) is the mean value of ρI in the jth lag bin ob-
tained from generated data given a value of δ; and wj is the weight of
the jth lag bin to emphasize the importance of realistic reproduction of
the simultaneous rainfall properties at close stations, and can be taken
as, for example, wj = (τmax − τj)/τmax, where τmax is the maximum
value of τj. The most plausible value of δ is the one corresponding to the
minimum objective index, which will be further illustrated in Section
3.2.
2.4. Adaptation to climate change
There is sufficient flexibility for the proposed model to consider the
variations of rainfall characteristics due to climate change. For ex-
ample, adjustments can be made to the marginal distributions of W, D
and I for future scenarios to capture the variations of rainfall duration,
interval time and intensity, while the correlation between W and I, as
well as the inter-station spatial correlation can be considered as sta-
tionary for simplicity (Peres & Cancelliere, 2018; Lee & Singh, 2019).
Trend of regional climate change is usually identified based on histor-
ical data analysis or climate projections from a regional climate model.
When long-term historical observations are available, the variation
trends of W, D and I can be explored and the parameters of the marginal
distributions can be adjusted through extrapolation. Besides, the sta-
tistic moments are usually easy to obtain from rainfall projection, and
the change of parameters can be transformed from projected statistic
moments. As the types of marginal distributions can be different for
different samples, the changing rates of the three variables can be
evaluated with the change rates of statistical moments instead of the
parameters of the marginal distributions:
Fn = Mn, f Mn, r (8)
where Fn is the change rate of the nth moment of a variable; Mn,f and
Mn,r are the nth moment of the variable in a future period and a re-
ference period, respectively. For simplicity, they are obtained through
linear regression, as demonstrated later in this paper.
3. Rain field generation for the Greater Bay Area with historical
data
3.1. Study area and historical data
The proposed rain field generator is applied to GBA in South China.
GBA has a humid subtropical monsoon climate characterised by clear
rainy and dry seasons, and the average annual rainfall is over 1300 mm.
Generally, the monthly rainfall amount in GBA has two peaks annually,
Y. Qiang, et al. Journal of Hydrology 583 (2020) 124584

50

40
Guangzhou station
30

20

10

50

40 Dongguan station
30
Rainfall intensity (mm/h)

20

10

50

40 Shenzhen station
30

20

10

50

40 Zhuhai station
30

20

10

0
1998 2003 2008 2013 2017
Year
Fig. 4. Rainfall observations in rainy seasons at 4 representative stations in GBA.

Table 1
Optimal model identification for marginal distributions and copulas.
AIC values of candidate models (×103)

Lognormal Generalized extreme value Exponential Inverse Gaussian Geometric

Dry spell duration, D 415.9 423.0 426.8 415.6 430.9

Wet spell duration, W 165.7 267.1 162.9 166.1 161.8
Average intensity, I 244.0 241.8 240.0 280.6 −

Gaussian Frank Clayton Gumbel

Copula, C −5.2 −7.2 −1.6 −2.4

Note: the model with value in bold italic is the optimal one with minimum AIC value.

Table 2
Parameter estimates for rain field generation in GBA.
Variable Description Equation Parameter Value

Dry spell duration, D Inverse Gaussian distribution μ 10.598

FD (d ) =
d ( d
µ
1) + exp ( ) 2
µ d ( d
µ )
+1
λ 3.987
Wet spell duration, W Geometric distribution FW (w ) = 1 (1 p) w p 0.548
Average intensity, I Exponential distribution FI (i) = 1 e i β 2.374
Copula, C Frank copula 1 (e u1 1)(e u2 1) θ 2.687
C (u1, u2; ) = ln 1 +
e 1
Peak intensity, im Power form im = a × i b a 1.605
b 0.934

Note: d* = d/3; w* = w/3.

5
Y. Qiang, et al. Journal of Hydrology 583 (2020) 124584

(a) 0.6 (b) 0.20

0.5
0.15

Probability density

Probability density
0.4

0.3 0.10
Geometric distribution Inverse Gaussian distrbution
0.2
0.05
0.1

0.0 0.00
0 10 20 30 40 50 0 30 60 90 120 150
Wet spell duration, W (h) Dry spell duration, D (h)
(c) 0.5 (d) 25

Average intensity, I (mm/h)

0.4 20
Probability density

Frank copula
0.3 15 10-5

10-4
0.2 Exponential distribution 10
-3
0.01 10
0.1 5
0.05
0.0 0
0 4 8 12 16 20 3 10 20 30 40

Average intensity, I (mm/h) Wet spell duration, W (h)

Fig. 5. Marginal distributions for (a) wet spell duration; (b) dry spell duration; (c) average intensity; and (d) joint distribution for wet spell duration and average
intensity.

and the largest rainfall amounts occur in June, May and August. Most of
GBA is delta plain with smooth terrain, surrounded by intermittent
mountains and hills. The topography of GBA and locations of 41 rainfall
stations are shown in Fig. 1. Hourly rainfall data is recorded by these
rainfall stations and daily rainfall data is available to the public. Ad-
ditionally, high resolution rainfall data is also available from the da-
taset of NASA Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (Huffman et al.,
2007). The temporal and spatial resolutions of the rainfall data are 3 h
and 0.25° × 0.25°, respectively. The observation periods are the rainy
seasons (from May to August) of each year from 1998 to 2017. The
rainfall data in this paper is obtained from the NASA dataset. Ob-
servations at four representative stations (Guangzhou, Dongguan,
Shenzhen and Zhuhai) in GBA are shown in Fig. 4.

3.2. Determination of model parameters

For GBA, the marginal distributions of variables W, D and I are

Fig. 6. Determination of the spatial correlation parameter: (a) identification
according to the minimum objective index; (b) decay trends of the correlation
coefficient with the separation distance.
chosen based on the historical data at the locations of rainfall stations.
Data from all the stations is pooled together to estimate the parameters
for the marginal distributions and the joint distribution because GBA is
a meteorological homogeneous region (Chong & Lee, 2015) and a large
number of rain stations are located on the delta plain with low eleva-
tions, which makes the effect of topography to be very low. Five can-
didate marginal distributions (i.e., lognormal, generalized extreme
value, exponential, inverse Gaussian, and geometric distributions) and
four candidate copulas (i.e., Gaussian, Frank, Clayton and Gumbel co-
pulas) are compared to fit the data in GBA. Note that W and D are
normalized by 3.0 in this study because 3-hour interval rainfall data is
used. As shown in Table 1, the geometric distribution, inverse Gaussian
distribution and exponential distribution are chosen to model the wet
spell duration, dry spell duration and average intensity, respectively;
and the Frank copula is selected to model the joint distribution between
W and I due to their respective minimum AIC values. The corresponding
model parameters, as well as the parameters for peak intensity, are
provided in Table 2. Fig. 5 illustrates that all the selected probability
models fit the data very well. With respect to the spatial correlation

6
Y. Qiang, et al. Journal of Hydrology 583 (2020) 124584

(a) 50 (b)
Guangzhou station Day 1
40

30

20

10

50
Dongguan station
Rainfall intensity (mm/h)

40

30

20 Day 2
10

50

40 Shenzhen station

30

20

10

50
Day 3
40 Zhuhai station

30

20

10

0
1998 2003 2008 2013 2017
Year
Fig. 7. Example of generated rainfall: (a) one realization of rainfall generation in rainy season at four representative stations for a period of 20 years; (b) spatial
distributions of 24-hour cumulative rainfall during an intense rainstorm.

Table 3 cumulative rainfall amount during a generated intensive rainstorm are

Comparison of rainfall characteristics.
Rainfall characteristics Observation
Average number of events 78.2
Average single event rainfall (mm) 15.0
Standard deviation of single event 23.5
rainfall (mm)
Total rainfall amount within 4 months 1170.7
(mm)
parameter δ, a trial-and-error method is adopted for a series of discrete
values with a certain interval to minimize the objective index Δ, be-
cause the variation trend of Δ with δ is of concern and minor differences
in δ have little impact on the simulation results. The objective index Δ is
calculated from the mean value of a number of simulations with nine
possible values of δ ranging from 200 to 600 km with an interval of
50 km, and a value of δ = 400 km corresponding to the minimum Δ is
chosen (Fig. 6a). Fig. 6b demonstrates a consistent decay trend of si-
multaneous rainfall intensity with the separation distance based on si-
mulated and observed data.
3.3. Validation of rainfall characteristics
With all the parameters determined, the rainfall processes of any
duration can be generated within the study area. One hundred reali-
zations of 20-year rainfall (4-month for each year) are generated, and
an example of generated rainfall at the four representative stations and
the variation of the interpolated spatial distribution of 24-hour
shown in Fig. 7.
Simulation
Table 3 compares four characteristics of the generated and observed
rainfalls, including average number of rainfall events, average single
Range Average event rainfall, standard deviation of single event rainfall, and total
rainfall amount within 4 months. All the four characteristics are well
75.1–87.3 81.3
14.3–17.3 15.6
reproduced by the proposed rainfall generator. In addition, frequency
21.9–28.6 24.6 analysis is conducted with the annual maximum time series of observed
and generated rainfall amounts in four common durations, i.e., 6, 12,
1136.3–1405.8 1271.2 24 and 48 h. It should be noted that the generated rainfall data from all
the stations is pooled together as a single sample in the frequency
analysis because of the short length of observation period. In fact,
simply pooling data from different stations will include some samples
with strong dependency, i.e. the spatial correlation among stations can
reduce the number of effective samples. This kind of effect is ignored
here because the analysis is just used for validation purpose. For each
realization, the generalized extreme value distribution is used to fit the
data and the rainfall amounts corresponding to several exceedance
probability values are calculated. The results are shown in Fig. 8. For
different rainfall durations, the observed values are mostly inside the
90% confidence interval of simulated values. For a short duration (i.e.,
6-hour), the observed values are a bit larger than the simulated results
or near the upper bound. These are understandable because the pat-
terns of rainfall events are assumed to have a similar predefined profile
(i.e., an exponentially increase to the peak value first, followed by an
exponentially decrease). The difference between the real temporal
variation of rainfall and the assumed profile may cause bias especially
for the cumulative rainfall amount in a short duration. As a whole, the
generated rainfall is able to reproduce the statistical characteristics of
observations, including extreme events.

7
Y. Qiang, et al. Journal of Hydrology 583 (2020) 124584

(a) 1000 (b) 1000

6-hour Simulation 12-hour Simulation
800 Observation 800 Observation

Rainfall amount (mm)

Rainfall amount (mm)
600 600

400 400

200 200

0 0
1E-3 0.01 0.1 0.5 1E-3 0.01 0.1 0.5
Frequency Frequency
(c) 1000 (d) 1000
24-hour Simulation 48-hour Simulation
800 Observation 800 Observation

Rainfall amount (mm)

Rainfall amount (mm)

600 600

400 400

200 200

0 0
1E-3 0.01 0.1 0.5 1E-3 0.01 0.1 0.5
Frequency Frequency

Fig. 8. Frequency distributions of observed and simulated cumulative rainfall amounts in different durations (the shadows are 90% confidence intervals): (a) 6 h; (b)
12 h; (c) 24 h; (d) 48 h.

4. Generation of future rainfall scenarios for the Greater Bay Area

4.1. Adaptation to regional climate change

In addition to learning the past characteristics of rainfall, possible

Fig. 9. Variation of parameters of marginal distributions: (a) wet spell duration
(geometric distribution); (b) dry spell duration (inverse Gaussian distribution);
(c) average intensity (exponential distribution).
rainfall scenarios in the future are of great interest because it will sig-
nificantly influence the magnitudes of rainfall-triggered hazards and
the strategies of risk mitigation in GBA. Evidences of climate change in
terms of precipitation in the study area have been documented in the
literature (Zhang et al., 2009; Lenderink et al., 2011; Chen et al., 2012;
Du et al., 2016). A clear decreasing trend in rainy days and increasing
trend in the intensity and amount of extreme rainstorms have been
found in the past decades. The parameters of the proposed model can be
adjusted to consider the future trend of rainfall under climate change.
Although the observation period of data in this paper is relatively
short, some trends can still be found. The trends of inter-annual var-
iations of the parameters of the marginal distributions for the three
variables characterising the process of rainfall are shown in Fig. 9. The
inverse Gaussian distribution is used to fit the samples of dry spell
duration, and the probability density function of the dry spell duration
exhibits a clear trend to become less positively skewed, which indicates
that the probability of longer dry spell has increased over the past
20 years. Similarly, the probability density function of the average in-
tensity shows a trend that the rainfall has become more intense during
the past two decades.
To consider the future rainfall scenarios of the study area, the
parameters of the marginal distributions of the three variables are ex-
trapolated assuming the trend to be linear, while the other parameters
(i.e., the dependency between W and I, the relation between peak in-
tensity and average intensity, and the spatial correlation) are assumed
unchanged. Rainfall is generated with the adjusted parameters of the
marginal distributions of W, D and I during the period of 2080–2100.
The moments of the three variables in the future period and the asso-
ciated changing rates can be calculated. Frequency analysis is then
carried out with the results of 100 realizations. Fig. 10 compares the
frequency distributions of simulated rainfall in the past and the future.
The upper bounds of the 90% intervals, as well as the medians of

8
Y. Qiang, et al. Journal of Hydrology 583 (2020) 124584

(a) 1000 (b) 1000

6-hour 1998-2017 12-hour 1998-2017
800 2081-2100 800 2081-2100

Rainfall amount (mm)

Rainfall amount (mm)

600 600

400 400

200 200

0 0
1E-3 0.01 0.1 0.5 1E-3 0.01 0.1 0.5
Frequency Frequency
(c) 1000 (d) 1000
24-hour 1998-2017 48-hour 1998-2017
800 2081-2100 800 2081-2100
Rainfall amount (mm)

Rainfall amount (mm)

600 600

400 400

200 200

0 0
1E-3 0.01 0.1 0.5 1E-3 0.01 0.1 0.5
Frequency Frequency
Fig. 10. Comparison of the frequency distributions of cumulative rainfall amount of different durations in the past (1998–2017) and future (2081–2100) (the solid
lines are median lines and the shadows are 90% confidence intervals): (a) 6 h; (b) 12 h; (c) 24 h; (d) 48 h.

Fig. 11. Comparison of the frequency distributions of rainfall amounts of different durations generated with different spatial correlation parameters (the solid and
dashed lines are median lines and 90% confidence intervals, respectively): (a) 6 h; (b) 12 h; (c) 24 h; (d) 48 h.

rainfall amount for all the four durations show a significant upside shift,
especially for low frequency events. For example, the medians of future
rainfall at the frequency of 0.01 increase by 11.3%, 8.1%, 8.9% and
7.6% for durations of 6, 12, 24 and 48 h, respectively. Based on the
trend extrapolation of the past 20 years, the simulation results imply a
major increase in rainfall extremes at the end of 21st century. The in-
creasing trend of short-duration rainfall is particularly significant,
which indicates that flash floods and shallow slope failures related to
short-term and high intensity rainfall will become more frequent in the
future in GBA. The extrapolation is suitable for preliminary evaluation
of future rainfall scenarios. More rigorous adjustments can be made
based on projections from climate models.
4.2. Effect of spatial correlation
In the proposed model, the spatial correlation parameter δ is used to
characterise the inter-station correlation. In Section 4.1, the spatial
correlation is assumed to be stationary in adaptation to climate change
given that the variation of spatial correlation is difficult to evaluate. In
this section, sensitivity analysis is carried out to investigate the effect of

9
Y. Qiang, et al.
spatial correlation on the model performance in terms of the frequency-
based regional rainfall characteristics. Parameter δ is scaled to be one
half and twice of the value (i.e., 200 and 800 km) estimated from the
historical data. Different from the frequency analysis in Section 3.3, the
generated annual maximum time series from different stations are not
simply pooled together in this case, because the difference of inter-
station correlation will lead to different sample numbers. Instead, a
method using regional L-moments modified from the method of prob-
ability weighted moments estimation (Hosking & Wallis, 2005) is
adopted here for regional frequency analysis. The method of regional
frequency analysis is used to estimate the frequency distribution of
rainfall from the generalized extreme value distribution with para-
meters determined using regional averages of the mean, L-variance and
L-skewness. This method is based on the meteorological homogeneity of
the study area, which has been verified by Chong and Lee (2015).
The results of the regional frequency distribution with different
rainfall durations are shown in Fig. 11. A stronger spatial correlation (a
larger δ value) leads to higher uncertainties, especially for low fre-
quencies. The differences of uncertainty intervals induced by δ decrease
and tend to be similar as the frequency becomes larger. For long-
duration rainfall (i.e., 48-hour), the uncertainty growth due to a larger
δ for low frequency events is quite remarkable; the upper bound of
which increases by 44.7% for events with a frequency of 0.001 when δ
is doubled. Except for the uncertainty, there are no obvious differences
between the magnitudes (medians) of 6-hour and 12-hour rainfall
generated with different δ values, which indicates that the variation of δ
controlling the spatial distribution of rainfall within each specific time
slot will not have a significant influence on the statistical characteristics
of short-duration regional rainfall. For rainfall of long durations (i.e.,
24-hour and 48-hour), the magnitudes (medians) of low frequency
events will be smaller as the spatial correlation becomes stronger. The
inter-station spatial correlation is very important in terms of un-
certainty of statistical characteristics of generated rainfall, and it is
desirable to take the variation of spatial correlation parameter into
account when adapting the model to climate change. However, since
the differences of rainfall magnitudes caused by variation of δ are not
very large, for problems that concern only about the overall regional
characteristics of rainfall, the spatial correlation parameter still can be
assumed to be stationary and even selected based on experience instead
of choosing from a wide range, and a predefined spatial correlation
function suffices to capture the regional spatial variation feature. On
the other hand, more attention should be paid to the description of
spatial correlation to make the features of generated areal rainfall of
each specific time slot more realistic, and the effect of terrain should be
considered in the spatial correlation analysis in areas with large var-
iations in topography.
5. Summary and conclusions
A spatial-temporal rain field generator based on point observations
is developed and applied to the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macau Greater
Bay Area (GBA) which frequently suffers storm-related hazards. The
major conclusions are as follows:
1. The rain field generator simulates the spatial-temporal rain field
through an alternating renewal process in the time domain with the
consideration of inter-station spatial correlation in the space do-
main. The statistical characteristics of the rainfall in GBA is well
reproduced by the rain field generator, which demonstrates the
model’s ability as a tool for hazard analysis in GBA.
2. The rain field generator can be adapted for climate change with the
parameters of the marginal distributions of three variables de-
scribing duration, interval and intensity of rainfall events adjusted.
Extrapolating the variation trends of the marginal distributions ob-
served in the past 20 years in GBA to the end of 21st century, the
simulation results show a significant increase in rainfall extremes in
10
Journal of Hydrology 583 (2020) 124584
GBA, especially for short-duration rainfall.
3. The sensitivity of spatial correlation parameter quantifying the
inter-station correlation is investigated. The uncertainty of gener-
ated rainfall will increase significantly for low frequency events as
the correlation becomes stronger, which underlines the importance
of spatial correlation in regional rainfall modelling. However, the
differences in the magnitudes of regional rainfall induced by spatial
correlation are limited especially for short-duration rainfall.
4. The proposed rain field generator can be combined with physically-
based distributed models for hydrological and geologic hazard
analyses in GBA to investigate the future hazard scenarios under
climate change in the next step.
CRediT authorship contribution statement
Yejia Qiang: Data curation, Formal analysis, Writing - original
draft. Limin Zhang: Conceptualization, Methodology, Funding acqui-
sition, Supervision, Writing - review & editing. Te Xiao: Software,
Validation, Investigation.
Declaration of Competing Interest
The authors declare that they have no known competing financial
interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influ-
ence the work reported in this paper.
Acknowledgements
This work was supported by the Science and Technology Plan of
Shenzhen, China (Project No. JCYJ20180507183854827) and the
Research Grants Council of the Hong Kong SAR Government (Project
Nos. C6012-15G and 16206217). The rainfall data used in this paper
can be downloaded from the dataset of NASA Tropical Rainfall
Measuring Mission (https://trmm.gsfc.nasa.gov/).
Appendix A. Supplementary data
Supplementary data to this article can be found online at https://
doi.org/10.1016/j.jhydrol.2020.124584.
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