A generalized spatial-temporal model of rainfall based on a clustered point process

The objective in this paper is to present and fit a relatively simple stochastic spatial-temporal model of rainfall in which the arrival times of rain cells occur in a clustered point process. In the x-y plane, rain cells are represented as discs; each disc having a random radius; the locations of the disc centres being given by a two-dimensional Poisson process. The intensity of each cell is a random variable that remains constant over the area of the disc and throughout the lifetime of the cell, the lifetime being an exponential random variable. The cells are randomly classified from 1 to n with different parameters for the different cell types, so that the random variables of an arbitrary cell, e. g. radius and intensity, are correlated. Multi-site second-order properties are derived and used to fit the model to hourly rainfall data taken from six sites in the Thames basin, UK.