Analysis of Mapping Techniques for Mountain Precipitation: A Case Study of Alpine Region, Austria

Truly representative precipitation map generation of mountain regions is a difficult task. Due to poor gauge representativity, complex topography and uneven density factors make the generation of representative precipitation maps a very difficult task. To generate representative precipitation maps, this study focused on analyzing four different mapping techniques: ordinary kriging, spline technique (SP), inverse distance weighting (IDW) and regression kriging (RK). The generated maps are assessed through cross-validation statistics, spatial cross-consistency test and by water balance approach. The largest prediction error is produced by techniques missing information on co-variables. The ME and RMSE values show that IDW and SP are the most biased techniques. The RK technique produced the best model results with 1.38mm and 72.36mm ME and RMSE values respectively. The comparative analysis proves that RK model can produce reasonably accurate values at poorly gauged areas, where geographical information compensated the poor availability of local data.