Spatial Prediction of Monthly Precipitation in Sulaimani Governorate using Artificial Neural Network Models

Abstract

ANN modeling is used here to predict missing monthly precipitation data in one station of the eight weather stations network in Sulaimani Governorate. Eight models were developed, one for each station as for prediction. The accuracy of prediction obtain is excellent with correlation coefficients between the predicted and the measured values of monthly precipitation ranged from (90% to 97.2%). The eight ANN models are found after many trials for each station and those with the highest correlation coefficient were selected. All the ANN models are found to have a hyperbolic tangent and identity activation functions for the hidden and output layers respectively, with learning rate of (0.4) and momentum term of (0.9), but with different data set sub-division into training, testing and holdout data sub-sets, and different number of hidden nodes in the hidden layer. It is found that it is not necessary that the nearest station to the station under prediction has the highest effect; this may be attributed to the high differences in elevation between the stations. It can also found that the variance is not necessary has effect on the correlation coefficient obtained.

Keywords

• ANN models, monthly precipitation data, weather station networks, prediction, spatial distribution of precipitation.