The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that a finite state cellular
automata model is suitable for modeling rainfall in the space-time plane. The
time-series properties of the simulated series are matched with historical rainfall
data gathered from Whenuapai, NZ. The spatial scale of the model cells
in related to land-area by optimizing the cross-correlation between sites at lag
0 relative to rainfall data collected from Auckland, NZ. The model is shown
to be adequate for simulation in time, but inadequate in spatial dimension for
short distances.
