Description and objectives

The main objective of the project is to develop and “engineer” a procedure for simulating high-temporal-resolution precipitation series and to provide a prototype of an interactive platform for its use.
From a methodological perspective, the approach involves two distinct phases:

• Simulation of daily precipitation series
• Disaggregation of these series to the desired temporal resolution.

For the first phase, the project will use the CoSMoS model (Papalexiou, 2018), which has demonstrated excellent performance in reproducing the distributions and correlation structures present in observed series. For the second phase, a multifractal disaggregation model will be applied, specifically designed to use as input the parameters of rainfall possibility curves, which are widely used in professional practice.

From a practical application perspective, the long-term vision is to provide an interactive platform hosting a database of synthetic daily precipitation series generated with the proposed model under both current conditions and climate change scenarios. Users will be able to interactively access this database, which will serve as input for the disaggregation model, allowing them to generate sub-hourly synthetic series at any location simply by assigning the parameters of rainfall possibility curves—either currently available or corresponding to climate change scenarios as suggested by the scientific literature, where available.

The choice to implement a two-phase, cascading procedure stems from the fact that available historical daily series cover much longer periods than sub-hourly series. This approach maximizes the use of available information to ensure robust and realistic simulations, which would not be possible if the models were calibrated directly on the much shorter sub-hourly observational series.