Establishing a method of short-term rainfall forecasting based on GNSS-derived PWV and its application

Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) can effectively retrieve precipitable water vapor (PWV) with high precision and high-temporal resolution. GNSS-derived PWV can be used to reflect water vapor variation in the process of strong convection weather. By studying the relationship between time-varying PWV and rainfall, it can be found that PWV contents increase sharply before raining. Therefore, a short-term rainfall forecasting method is proposed based on GNSS-derived PWV. Then the method is validated using hourly GNSS-PWV data from Zhejiang Continuously Operating Reference Station (CORS) network of the period 1 September 2014 to 31 August 2015 and its corresponding hourly rainfall information. The results show that the forecasted correct rate can reach about 80%, while the false alarm rate is about 66%. Compared with results of the previous studies, the correct rate is improved by about 7%, and the false alarm rate is comparable. The method is also applied to other three actual rainfall events of different regions, different durations, and different types. The results show that the method has good applicability and high accuracy, which can be used for rainfall forecasting, and in the future study, it can be assimilated with traditional weather forecasting techniques to improve the forecasted accuracy.