A model of rainfall based on finite-state cellular automata

Abstract

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.