Rainfall is a key hydrologic input that is often required by hydrologic software. However, the raw rainfall information is often not suitable for import directly into hydrologic software. CatchmentSIM incorporates a rainfall time series analyser (Analysis >> Rainfall Analyser) to assist in processing rainfall information for input into third party software and hydrologic models. Specifically, the rainfall analyser provides facilities to:
•Search for nearby rain gauges and automatically download available daily data from the Bureau of Meteorology website (Analysis >> Find Nearby Gauges) (Australia only).
•Import multiple rainfall time series from a variety of different file formats (e.g., BoM, MHL, SILO, custom CSV).
•Review the historic coverage of all gauges.
•Identify when significant historic rainfall events have occurred.
•Determine which gauges were active during each historic event.
•Re-sample/disaggregate daily rainfall information to a sub-daily time step based upon nearby sub-daily gauges, linear interpolation or a user defined temporal pattern.
•Create rainfall hyetographs and cumulative rainfall charts for each gauge during each nominated historic event.
•Interpolate rainfall depths and time series between gauge locations using Inverse Distance Weights or Thiessen polygons.
•Calculate unique rainfall time series for each CatchmentSIM subcatchment (or for other polygons imported from an external GIS file).
•Create isohyet maps and animations.
•Export subcatchment-based time series for historic rainfall events to third party hydrologic software to ensure a reliable spatial and temporal description of the rainfall is provided.
Further detailed documentation on the rainfall analyser is included in the program reference. A sample application of the rainfall analyser is also provided as part of Tutorial 1.
