ANN-RBF Hybrid Model for Spatiotemporal Estimation of Monthly Precipitation Case Study: Ardabil Plain

For estimation of monthly precipitation, considering the intricacy and lack of accurate knowledge about the physical relationships, black box models usually are used because they produce more accurate values. In this article, a hybrid black box model, namely ANN-RBF, is proposed to estimate spatiotemporal value of monthly precipitation. In the first step a Multi Layer Perceptron (MLP) network is used for temporal estimation of monthly precipitation using the value of precipitation in previous months in the same gauging station. In the second step, Radial Basis Function (RBF) is used to estimate the value of precipitation in specific month and a spatial point within the study region, considering the value of monthly precipitation in other stations. In this regard, three commonly used RBFs’ Multi Quadric (MQ), Inverse Multi Quadric (IMQ) and Gaussian (Ga), are used for spatial estimation. Finally, the combination of these two steps leads to ANN-RBF hybrid model. The model is examined using monthly precipitation data of Ardabil plain located north western of Iran. All results show the reliable accuracy of ANN-RBF model for spatiotemporal estimation of precipitation. Furthermore, IMQ RBF yields more accurate results for spatial estimation in comparison with two other RBFs. The cross-validation scheme was also employed to validate the spatial estimation performance of the proposed model.