Modelling of rainfall occurrences at Grootfontein (Karoo, South Africa)

Abstract

The modelling approach that was followed in this study makes use of a record of daily rainfall, dealing with seasonality by partitioning the year into a number of approximately homogeneous ‘seasons’. The capabilities of two models to preserve various observed statistics of March rainfall at the study site, were considered. The outputs of both were found to compare well with observation, one of the models (the first-order Markov chain) being marginally better than the other.