Hourly Disaggregation of Daily Rainfall in Texas Using

Measured Hourly Precipitation at Other Locations

Janghwan Choi1; Scott A. Socolofsky, M.ASCE2; and Francisco Olivera, M.ASCE3

Abstract: A method to disaggregate daily rainfall into hourly precipitation is evaluated across Texas. Based on measured precipitation
data, the method generates disaggregated hourly hyetographs that match measured daily totals by selecting storm intensity patterns from
measured hourly databases using a one parameter selection method. The model is applied across Texas using historic data measured at
hourly precipitation gauges; performance is evaluated by the model’s ability to reproduce the measured hourly rainfall statistics at each
gauge. Initially, each hourly precipitation gauge is evaluated in its performance as a disaggregation database. Based on a cluster analysis
of the results to determine which precipitation databases should be used for general disaggregation, no preferences in space or among
gauge characteristics 共e.g., period of record, precipitation statistics兲 were identified. As a result, a Texas state database that contains all of
the measured hourly data in Texas is proposed for use by the disaggregation algorithm. The state database is verified for a selection of
gauges across Texas and performed as well at a given station as using that station’s measured rainfall for the disaggregation. The method
is further applied to estimate intensity-duration curves, which show that the disaggregation algorithm captures the majority of the storm
intensities well and diverges by less than 17% from the measured intensities for the extreme runoff-generating events.
DOI: 10.1061/共ASCE兲1084-0699共2008兲13:6共476兲
CE Database subject headings: Precipitation; Storms; Rainfall intensity; Texas; Statistics; Stochastic models; Hydrology.

Introduction 共Bonner 1998兲, yielding a strong motivation to disaggregate the

Partitioning rainfall into surface and subsurface pathways is a
fundamental goal of watershed modeling and provides the critical
forcing mechanism to many watershed processes 共Chow 1964;
Eagleson 1970; Phillip and Wayne 1992兲. To perform the parti-
tioning, soil moisture plays an important role and is affected by
the duration of dry periods and the local intensity of rainfall. As a
result, continuous simulation models for watershed hydrology
typically require a high spatial resolution of subdaily rainfall data,
such as hourly measurements, as input. Although hourly data may
be available for recent years or for a few gauges, continuous
simulation models require many years of data at many sites for
calibration and verification. In the United States, historic daily
rainfall records are nearly three times as dense as hourly gauges
1
Hazard Engineering Resources, Dewberry, 8401 Arlington Blvd.,
Fairfax, VA 22031-4666. E-mail: jchoi@dewberry.com; formerly,
Research Assistant, Zachry Dept. of Civil Engineering, Texas A&M
Univ., 3136 TAMU, College Station, TX 77843-3136. E-mail: mashah@
tamu.edu
2
Assistant Professor, Zachry Dept. of Civil Engineering, Texas A&M
Univ., 3136 TAMU, College Station, TX 77843-3136 共corresponding
author兲. E-mail: socolofs@tamu.edu
3
Associate Professor, Associate Editor of the Journal of Hydrologic
Engineering, Associate Editor of the Journal of Water Resources Planning
and Management, Zachry Dept. of Civil Engineering, Texas A&M Univ.,
3136 TAMU, College Station, TX 77843-3136. E-mail: folivera@
civil.tamu.edu
Note. Discussion open until November 1, 2008. Separate discussions
must be submitted for individual papers. To extend the closing date by
one month, a written request must be filed with the ASCE Managing
Editor. The manuscript for this paper was submitted for review and pos-
sible publication on June 15, 2006; approved on August 7, 2007. This
paper is part of the Journal of Hydrologic Engineering, Vol. 13, No. 6,
June 1, 2008. ©ASCE, ISSN 1084-0699/2008/6-476–487/$25.00.
daily data into hourly time series for watershed modeling. The
disaggregated hourly time series are necessarily synthetic and can
be drawn from either rainfall simulation models or measured rain-
fall databases. Socolofsky et al. 共2001兲 introduced a method using
the latter approach in which an hourly storm database is stochas-
tically sampled to select appropriate storm events while being
constrained to reproduce the measured daily total. Though this
method appears fruitful for engineering applications, it has only
been demonstrated for a few gauges in Massachusetts. Here, we
evaluate its performance to generate synthetic time series of
hourly rainfall from daily totals across Texas. Applying this
method over a large region like Texas provides significant guid-
ance for applications in other states or countries.
To effectively predict runoff, the input to hydrologic models
must accurately capture rainfall intensity and storm intermittency
共William 1981; William and Peter 1981; Donigian et al. 1984;
Marani et al. 1997; Margulis and Entekhabi 2001兲. The type of
precipitation data 共historical or synthetic兲 and the temporal and
spatial resolution of rainfall data required by the model, however,
depend on the goal of a particular study. In this paper, we focus
on data needed for the hydrologic calibration and verification of
continuous watershed models, where the historical occurrence of
storms is desired. Previous studies have shown that soil moisture
can be tracked adequately using daily extreme temperature and
evaporation data fit to sinusoidal diurnal patterns 共Donigian et al.
1984兲. On the other hand, to correctly predict runoff generation,
rainfall intensity data need to be at the resolution of storms and
storm cells—typically of the order of kilometers in space and
minutes to hours in time. In disaggregating daily rainfall at a
point, two characteristics of storm events are unknown: The start
time and the intensity pattern of each event. In small watersheds
where runoff reaches the outlet on the order of hours, both start
time and intensity are critical for calibration to historical flow

476 / JOURNAL OF HYDROLOGIC ENGINEERING © ASCE / JUNE 2008

data, and disaggregation must match both storm characteristics
accurately 共Hershenhorn and Woolhiser 1987; Econopouly et al.
1990; Koutsoyiannis et al. 2003兲. In larger watersheds where the
time of concentration of runoff approaches one to several days,
the actual time of rainfall is much less important than the intensity
pattern, and disaggregated time series need only match the inten-
sity characteristics of rainfall. Moreover, the historic river flow
data in the United States from the U.S. Geological Survey
共USGS兲 are available primarily as daily integrated flow, which
further diminishes the need for high temporal resolution of model
predictions of the times of rainfall or runoff generation. Hence, in
this article, we will assume that for the disaggregated time series
to be effective for most engineering applications of watershed
models, they must only match the rainfall statistics and measured
daily totals at the disaggregation site and not the actual time of
rainfall.
Two broad categories of methods are available to obtain rain-
fall with the correct statistics: Methods based on stochastic simu-
lation of precipitation and methods based on direct measurement
of hourly precipitation at an off-site gauge. In either case, the
synthetic rainfall data must be further conditioned to match the
measured daily rainfall in order to achieve disaggregation.
Stochastic simulation time series are generally obtained by
continuous-simulation stochastic rainfall models or through frac-
tal random cascade models. Most stochastic rainfall models are
based on the Bartlett-Lewis or Newman-Scott rectangular pulse
models 共Rodriguez-Iturbe et al. 1987, 1988; Islam et al. 1990;
Onof and Wheater 1993, 1994; Cowpertwait et al. 1996a,b兲.
These models utilize five to seven parameters to simulate rainfall.
The advantage of these synthetic time series is that they are of a
continuous nature, able to be resampled at any desired aggrega-
tion level. Various fractal random cascade models make use of the
scale invariance of the rainfall process over a range of time scales
共Schertzer and Lovejoy 1987; Ormsbee 1989; Gupta and
Waymire 1993; Veneziano et al. 1996; Olsson 1998; Olsson and
Berndtsson 1998; Hingray and Haha 2005; Molnar and Burlando
2005兲. These models capture the variability both between storms
and within storms and require the fitting of scaling laws to appor-
tion rainfall at different scales. For all these simulation methods,
two types of disaggregation are identified 共Koutsoyiannis and
Onof 2001兲. In the first case, called downscaling, the model pa-
rameters are estimated for measured data at one time scale 共e.g.,
daily兲 and used to obtain simulated rainfall at a lower 共e.g.,
hourly兲 time scale 共Bo et al. 1994兲. In the second case, the syn-
thetic time series are used to reproduce measured daily rainfall
totals by either sampling or conditioning the simulated rainfall
共Glasbey et al. 1995; Koutsoyiannis and Onof 2001; Koutsoyian-
nis et al. 2003; Gyasi-Agyei 2005兲. While efficient at rainfall
scale transformation 共based on their ability to match measured
rainfall statistics兲, each of these approaches uses multiple param-
eters to describe scaling laws, branching weights, and probability
distributions.
As an alternative to stochastic methods, deterministic rainfall
disaggregation utilizes known weather patterns or measurements
from nearby gauges. Gutierrez-Magness and McCuen 共2004兲
evaluated deterministic rainfall disaggregation methods for 74
gauges near the Chesapeake Bay watershed in the United States.
Their methods included uniform distribution of daily rainfall over
24 h, use of weather pattern methods, direct transfer of hourly
data from one gauge to another location, and scaling transfer
where the nondimensional intensity pattern at one gauge is used
to disaggregate the measured daily rainfall at another gauge
共Gutierrez-Magness and McCuen 2004兲. Because the exact time
JOURNAL OF HYDROLOGIC ENGINEERING © ASCE / JUNE 2008 / 477
of rainfall is unknown for this type of disaggregation, none of the
methods performed well when directly compared to the measured
data 共Gutierrez-Magness and McCuen 2004兲; comparison was not
made for rainfall statistics. Although deterministic approaches are
based on measured hourly rainfall, they are not expected to pre-
dict well the intensity structure of disaggregated storms because
of their inherent need to adjust the scale of measured precipitation
intensity patterns in order to match the measured daily totals.
The approach we apply here captures better the intensity struc-
ture of storms than do these deterministic methods while still
using measured data for disaggregation. Described in the “Data
and Disaggregation Methods” section below and in more detail in
Socolofsky et al. 共2001兲, the method utilizes a one-parameter sto-
chastic algorithm to select unscaled measured intensity patterns at
an off-site hourly recording database such that the synthetic time
series match the measured daily totals at the disaggregated gauge.
The purpose of this study is to evaluate the disaggregation
method over a large area and develop guidelines for its use; con-
sequently, some limitations and areas for further improvement of
the model will be highlighted. In the “Results and Discussion,”
we apply spatial analysis to show that the storm databases suc-
cessful for use in the disaggregation do not show spatial or
climatic patterns across Texas. This fact is exploited in the “Ap-
plication” section, which demonstrates the performance of the
disaggregation scheme for a set of verification gauges using a
single, lumped state of Texas rainfall database.
Data and Disaggregation Methods
In Texas, over 2,100 rain gauges are distributed over
695,670 km2. Of the over 2,100 gauges, only 646 are recording
hourly, and these have variable periods of record from a few
months to over 50 years. A valid daily rainfall disaggregation
tool, therefore, will significantly increase the spatial coverage of
hourly precipitation time series suitable for long-term hydrologic
simulation, calibration, and verification.
Rainfall Data
Hourly precipitation data for Texas were obtained from a com-
mercially available database 共EarthInfo 2001兲 based on data set
3240 of the National Climate Data Center 共NCDC 2003兲. For
Texas, the data included a total of 646 rain gauges. Out of these
646 gauges, 114 did not include location information 共i.e., longi-
tude and latitude兲 and were excluded from our analysis, leaving
the 532 hourly gauges shown in Fig. 1. The data coverage was
from 1900 to 2001, with an average record start time of 1952 and
an average period of record of 18 years. The longest period of
record was 61 years and occurred at 36 gauges. The spatial cov-
erage is relatively uniform with the lowest coverage in the pan
handle and greatest coverage in the northeast between Houston,
Dallas-Fort Worth, Austin, and San Antonio. Overall, average an-
nual precipitation in Texas increases from the west to the east
from 230 to 1,500 mm 共TWDB 2006兲.
Rainfall Disaggregation Method
To disaggregate daily data, we apply the stochastic storm selec-
tion method introduced by Socolofsky et al. 共2001兲. The method
disaggregates the measured daily rainfall at a given location uti-
lizing a database of measured hourly precipitation; the rainfall
database may be an on- or off-site gauge or a collection of

Fig. 1. Locations of the 532 NCDC rain gauges in Texas with hourly
data
gauges. The hourly precipitation data in the database are grouped
into individual storm events, where an event is defined as a
continuous sequence of uninterrupted hourly rainfall. Because
rainfall is disaggregated one day at a time, simulated storm events
may not extend beyond midnight. Thus, if the measured times of
rainfall corresponding to a storm event are used, events are trun-
cated in the measured time series at midnight; otherwise, events
are limited to a 24 h duration. Once the storm events are identi-
fied, they are further grouped by month, where each group
contains multiple years of data. The data are then sorted into
ascending order based on their total accumulated rainfall depth,
resulting in a cumulative distribution function 共CDF兲 for storm
depth of an event for each month. Thus, each entry in the CDF
corresponds to an actual, measured storm event in the hourly
precipitation database.
To disaggregate a measured daily total, several storm events
are stochastically selected from the monthly CDFs. We define the
depth of rainfall remaining to be disaggregated for a given day as
DT and the storm number in the monthly CDF as the event index.
To constrain the search for a representative event, the index a is
found in the CDF such that the corresponding event depth is equal
to the remaining depth DT. All events with indices less than a then
have a total event depth less than or equal to DT. A storm event is
selected by generating a uniformly distributed random number
between zero and a and taking the corresponding event from the
CDF. The selected event’s total depth is subtracted from the origi-
nal value of DT to obtain an updated value, and the algorithm
continues.
When the limit a is of the order of the number of storms in the
database, the selected events will closely match the CDF of
storms for the month; however, when DT becomes small, a is also
small, and the events with trace precipitation depths in the data-
base receive an inappropriately high probability of occurrence in
the disaggregated time series. As a result, the algorithm continues
to select storms from the CDF until the updated DT falls below a
threshold depth ␧. Socolofsky et al. 共2001兲 introduced the single
parameter ␧ to prevent the algorithm from overestimating the
number of trace events when DT becomes small and thereby un-
derestimating the probability of zero rainfall. Thus, ␧ is related to
the expected depth of the smallest rainfall events. This physical
interpretation of ␧ and its relationship to measured rainfall statis-
tics is explored in more detail in the “Results and Discussion”
section. Socolofsky et al. 共2001兲 explored two ways of handling
the rainfall occurring with a depth less than ␧: Either placing the
478 / JOURNAL OF HYDROLOGIC ENGINEERING © ASCE / JUNE 2008
remaining rainfall directly into a one-hour storm event, or simu-
lating the storm event from an exponential distribution. Because
the former choice creates a discontinuity in the CDF of the mod-
eled rainfall, the final event was selected from an exponential
distribution with mean depth equal to the remaining rainfall depth
DT and a duration of 1 h. This means that the simulated daily
totals only match the measured daily rainfall on average, and any
instantaneous discrepancies between the synthetic and measured
daily totals are on the order of ␧.
Once the measured and final events have been selected, each
event must be given a start time. In Socolofsky et al. 共2001兲, start
times were selected from a uniform random number distribution
constrained so that each event ends before midnight. When mul-
tiple events occurred at the same times, their depths were added
together. For the data presented here, this method is applied to the
final event simulated from the exponential distribution. For the
measured events, we attempt to preserve the occurrence of rain-
fall throughout the day by using the times measured at the hourly
gauges. In this way, the overall temporal distribution of rainfall
will be matched by the disaggregated time series; however, no
attempt is made to move storms consistently through a network of
daily recording gauges or to match the historical time of rainfall
on a given day. Thus, both approaches 共the random and measured
start time methods兲 give arbitrary start times for the events and
result in overlapping events on some days. In this paper, all over-
lapping events were added. The overlapping also changes the au-
tocorrelation structure of the rainfall in the synthetic time series
compared to the measured data. This effect is explored in more
detail in the “Results and Discussion” section. While all these
start times are arbitrary, as noted in the introduction, they are not
expected to significantly affect the times of peaks in the runoff
hydrograph for large watersheds, where the time of concentration
of runoff is of the order of days and the uncertainty in the time of
rainfall is of the order of hours.
Performance Assessment
To evaluate the performance of the disaggregation method, all of
the hourly recording rainfall gauges in Texas are used. Daily pre-
cipitation time series at each hourly gauge are created by sum-
ming the measured hourly precipitation, and the disaggregation
method is tested in its ability to disaggregate the daily measure-
ments into hourly synthetic time series. As pointed out by
Gutierrez-Magness and McCuen 共2004兲, disaggregated time se-
ries do not perform well when compared to the measured data on
an hour-by-hour basis because of the uncertainty in the start times
of storms in the disaggregated time series. As a result, we com-
pare the statistics of the measured and synthetic time series as
suggested by Socolofsky et al. 共2001兲 to evaluate performance.
They identified four important measures that should be matched
by the disaggregated time series: Conservation of mass, the prob-
ability of zero rainfall, the variance of hourly rainfall, and the lag
one-hour serial correlation coefficient. Each of these statistics is
calculated on a monthly basis for the measured and the disaggre-
gated time series. The performance of the disaggregation can be
affected by both the value of the parameter ␧ and the selection of
the hourly storm events database. Thus, ␧ is taken as a calibration
parameter, and is adjusted until a cost function summarizing the
correspondence between the measured and modeled statistics is
optimized 共see the next section “Automated Calibration” for de-
tails兲. For evaluating the selection of the hourly storm events
database for disaggregation, minimum performance standards for
the disaggregation method are required.
 Performance standards for the disaggregation method and
guidance for selecting values of ␧ across Texas are identified by
applying two types of disaggregation to the aggregated hourly
data in Texas. First, “autodisaggregation” uses the measured
hourly data at one gauge to disaggregate the daily totals for that
gauge. In this case, all of the measured hourly storm events at a
given daily gauge are present in the database during disaggrega-
tion so that it is feasible that the disaggregated time series exactly
match the measured record except for storm event depths below
␧. Moreover, the rainfall statistics of the hourly storms database
implicitly match the statistics of the daily gauge since the gauges
are coincident. For these reasons, the autodisaggregation results
are assumed to provide an objective standard for the best perfor-
mance that can be expected by this disaggregation method. The
separate question of whether this level of performance is adequate
for watershed modeling has been partially answered in the affir-
mative by Socolofsky et al. 共2001兲 and is an interesting topic for
further study, which we have begun for Texas. Second, “general
disaggregation” uses a database of storm events measured off site
to disaggregate a gauge’s daily totals. In this case, the hourly
storms database could be another gauge or collection of gauges.
This type of disaggregation explores the performance of the dis-
aggregation method for real disaggregation where the storms da-
tabase is necessarily located at some distance from the daily
recording station. By comparing the results for general disaggre-
gation to the performance standards set by the autodisaggregation,
guidance for selecting off-site gauges and estimates for the ex-
pected accuracy of the disaggregation method are made.
Automated Calibration
To apply the disaggregation method to all 532 of the hourly rain-
fall gauges in Texas, we use an automated approach to calibrate
the minimum storm size parameter ␧ on a monthly basis. To make
use of our knowledge of reasonable values for a small, one-hour
storm event, we apply a Bayesian approach for parameter estima-
tion 共Schweppe 1973; Socolofsky and Adams 2003兲. In this ap-
proach, we minimize the objective function
J共␧兲 = 关z − f共␧兲兴TC−1
v 关z − f共␧兲兴 + 关␧ − ¯
␧兴TC−1
␧ 关␧ − ¯
␧兴 共1兲
for each month, where the first term⫽standard weighted least-
squares estimator, and the second term⫽Bayesian regularization,
which penalizes values of ␧ that are far from an expected value ¯␧;
z⫽vector of measured monthly statistics 共i.e., the four perfor-
mance measures identified in the previous section兲, and
f共␧兲⫽vector of statistics calculated for the disaggregated data for
a given value of ␧. The vectors in Eq. 共1兲 are normalized by the
annual mean value of the measured statistics. The estimates for ¯␧,
called the prior, are taken as the calibrated monthly values of ␧
reported in Socolofsky et al. 共2001兲. The matrix C−1 v is a weight-
ing matrix of covariances for the statistics used in the optimiza-
tion, and for this application, we have used equal weighting. The
matrix C−1␧ is a weighting matrix for the variability in ␧—by
adjusting C−1
␧ , we show greater or lesser confidence in our ex-
pected values ¯␧. The method naturally converges on positive val-
ues of ␧ so that Lagrange multipliers were not needed. Because
f共␧兲 is nonlinear, the minimization is achieved by Taylor expan-
sion about the prior estimate ¯␧ to obtain an iterative secant
method solution to the nonlinear problem. Here, the Bayesian
regularization term is used to keep the nonlinear optimization
from getting lost when large, unrealistic values of ␧ are generated
during the search for the minimum. On the other hand, the cali-
bration should be free to converge on values different from those
JOURNAL OF HYDROLOGIC ENGINEERING © ASCE / JUNE 2008 / 479
Fig. 2. Surfaces for ␧ for the months of 共a兲 February; 共b兲 August.
Legend—white: 0 to 5 mm, gray: 5 to 10 mm, dark gray: 10 to
15 mm, and black: 15 to 20 mm
used by Socolofsky et al. 共2001兲. Thus, C−1 was taken as
␧
100 mm2, indicating a confidence in our prior estimates of ␧ of
approximately ⫾10 mm.
Results and Discussion
Distribution and Interpretation of Calibration
Parameter ␧ across Texas
Monthly values of the disaggregation parameter ␧ were estimated
for each of the 532 hourly gauges using the Bayesian automated
calibration procedure applied at each gauge to the autodisaggre-
gation process. The values of ␧ were estimated at each gauge in
order to evaluate regional trends and to correlate trends in ␧ to
trends in other physical parameters describing the rainfall process.
Once the ␧ values were estimated for each month and gauge
point, 12 interpolated surfaces were developed, so that ␧ values
could be estimated for each month and at every location in Texas.
The ordinary Kriging method was used to create the surfaces
共Johnson et al. 2001兲, which required normalizing the distribution
of the ␧ values and removing the outliers. Box-Cox transforma-
tions 共Box and Cox 1964兲 were performed to normalize the dis-
tribution, and values more than three standard deviations from the
mean were flagged as outliers and removed. The parameter of the
Box-Cox transformation was set interactively for each month
such that it minimized the kurtosis and the difference between the
mean and the median of the distribution of ␧ values. Fig. 2 pre-
sents the interpolated ␧ surfaces for February and August. Note
that the variability of the ␧ values depends more on the month of
the year than on the location. This seasonal variation was ex-
pected because of the different mechanisms that cause storms in
summer and winter. Generally speaking, winter storms in Texas
are associated with frontal air lifting, while summer storms are
associated with convective air lifting. The ␧ values according to
the interpolated surfaces range from 0.04 mm to 24.26 mm for
February with a mean of 4.44 mm and from 3.71 mm to
33.27 mm for August with a mean of 12.5 mm. By cross-
validating the observed and paired interpolated ␧ values, the mean
and root mean square errors, respectively, were −0.04 mm and
3.40 mm for February and 0.01 mm and 4.11 mm for August.
The relatively weak spatial variability in ␧ for the months
shown in Fig. 2 suggests it is possible to use constant values
across the state of Texas for each month to investigate the physi-
cal interpretation of ␧. Fig. 3 shows the spatially averaged values
of ␧ with one standard deviation error bars along with the

Fig. 3. Physical interpretation of the disaggregation parameter ␧.
Open circles give the mean of the monthly values averaged over all
gauges, and the error bars show plus and minus one standard devia-
tion of the monthly means across all gauges. Plot 共a兲 shows the
monthly variation of the depth of the smallest event each day; plot 共b兲
shows the monthly variation in the number of storm events each day;
and plot 共c兲 shows the monthly variation of the calibrated value of
epsilon.
monthly variation in the average depth of the smallest rainfall
event and the average number of events each rainy day. Compari-
son of the expected depth of the smallest rainfall events with
values of ␧ shows similar magnitudes and similar seasonal vari-
ability between these two parameters, with greater variability
within each month 共larger error bars兲 for the depth of the smallest
events than for ␧. Lower values of ␧ occur in the cooler months,
when frontal storms are more likely and the precipitation can
have long periods of light rain. These months also show smaller
minimum event depths and greater variability in the number of
events each day. Both of these attributes are consistent with the
slow passage of large frontal systems. Higher values of ␧ occur in
the warmer months, when convective thunder showers are more
likely, leading to short, intense storms. These days have fewer
events overall with a greater expected depth of rainfall in the
smallest event. All of these trends support the interpretation that ␧
describes the depth of the smallest expected rainfall events each
month. However, the large variability in the measured rainfall
characteristics and narrower variability in ␧ make it difficult to
derive a direct relationship between these or other rainfall char-
acteristics. In order to have the least uncertainty in the appropriate
480 / JOURNAL OF HYDROLOGIC ENGINEERING © ASCE / JUNE 2008
values of ␧, the remaining calculations were obtained by using the
␧ values interpolated at each disaggregation location from the
monthly ␧ surfaces.
Autodisaggregation Performance
To evaluate the autodisaggregation performance, the monthly sta-
tistics of the autodisaggregation time series at each gauge are
compared with the measured statistics of the hourly rainfall.
These results are necessary to define an objective performance
measure for the disaggregation model. In this comparison, only
339 out of the 532 gauges were considered. The other 193 gauges
consisted of 170 gauges that had periods of record less than five
years, which was deemed too short for the data to have statistical
value, and 23 gauges distributed randomly across Texas that were
reserved for model validation.
To quantify the performance of the autodisaggregation pro-
cess, several measures were used as suggested in Willmott
共1982兲. The mean absolute error 共MAE兲 and root relative square
error 共RRSE兲 both give a measure of the general magnitude of
errors in the model estimates without making a statement about
model bias. Here, we define the RRSE as
RRSE = 冑兺 共f − f̂兲 Ⲑ 兺 共f − f̄兲
2 2
共2兲
where f⫽measured value; f̂⫽modeled value; and f̄⫽average of
the measured values. To evaluate model bias, linear regression
was applied to the modeled values versus the measured data,
yielding measures of the intercept b1 and slope b0. To assess the
spread in the model results, the coefficient of determination r2 of
the linear regression is also reported. Each of these measures is
well known and is applied each month to paired data of measured
statistics from the hourly precipitation record and statistics of the
modeled hourly time series. Since the model exactly matched the
conservation of mass in the mean, results are only shown for the
probability of zero rainfall P0, the variance of the hourly rainfall
␴2, and the lag one-hour serial correlation coefficient ␳1. Because
the disaggregation method is stochastic, 30 model runs were per-
formed at each station, and the mean value of the statistics over
all 30 runs was used in the error quantification.
Table 1 reports these statistical measures of error and Fig. 4
shows the modeled versus the measured statistics for typical
months in winter 共February兲 and summer 共August兲. From these
results, it is seen that the zero rainfall probabilities P0 obtained by
autodisaggregation are close to the measured values. The vari-
ances ␴2 show some bias toward systematic underprediction, and
this tendency is more evident as the measured variance increases.
This fact was particularly strong in the month of February. The
lag one-hour serial correlation coefficient ␳1 shows the greatest
scatter and tends to be overpredicted for lower measured values
and underpredicted for higher measured values. In fact, the RRSE
for ␳1 indicates that the mean of the measured values of ␳1 is a
slightly better predictor than the modeled data. We hypothesize
that the error in the model for ␳1 is due to summing overlapping
storms when multiple events are selected to model a given day’s
rainfall. The summing process then changes the autocorrelation
structure of the measured intensity patterns. We attempted to im-
prove these results by selecting event start times to minimize the
overlap among events. While this did help somewhat, the im-
provement was not statistically significant. Another possible
source of the error could be the final event simulated from an
exponential distribution when the remaining daily rainfall depth is
below ␧. Although a more sophisticated model could be derived
Table 1. Performance Measures between the Autodisaggregated Time Series and the Measured Statistics of Hourly Rainfall
Month Statistic MAE
February P0 0.003
␴2 0.196 mm2
␳1 0.121
August P0 0.002
␴2 0.242 mm2
␳1 0.131
Note: Rainfall statistics are the probability of zero rainfall P0, the variance of hourly rainfall ␴2, and the lag one-hour serial correlation coefficient ␳1.
Performance measures are the mean absolute error 共mae兲, root relative square error 共RRSE兲, intercept b0, and slope b1 of the linear regression between the
modeled and measured statistics, and the coefficient of determination r2 of the linear regression model.
to model this event, it would inevitably require more parameters;
thus, the results presented here are the best available results using
this one-parameter model. In addition, because the hourly event
databases used for the autodisaggregation are at the same location
as the disaggregated gauge, these performance metrics specify the
best performance that can be expected by the stochastic storm
selection method in Texas.
Selection of Disaggregation Databases
For general disaggregation when hourly data are not available at
the daily recording station, the question arises: Which hourly
storm database should be used to disaggregate a given gauge
location? While nearby gauges may be expected to perform bet-
ter, a systematic study is needed. To accomplish this, we use each
hourly gauge in the state of Texas to disaggregate all the other
gauges so that trends can be identified. Three different perspec-
tives on gauge selection are investigated: 共1兲 Regional trends,
where spatially-contiguous groups of gauges with equal perfor-
mance are identified; 共2兲 trends in gauge characteristics, where
gauges with similar statistics or model parameters are identified;
and 共3兲 proximity trends, where the distance between the disag-
gregated and disaggregating gauges is evaluated. In the first two
cases, cluster analysis was used to identify these trends. In the
third case, visual inspection was used.
Cluster analysis is an exploratory data analysis method that
partitions observations into somewhat homogeneous groups
within which members have similar properties compared to mem-
bers in other groups 共Likas et al. 2003兲. Most clustering algo-
rithms fall into one of two techniques: Iterative square-error
partitional clustering and agglomerative hierarchical clustering
共Jain et al. 2000兲. Among these clustering algorithms, the expec-
tation maximization 共EM兲 algorithm—a square-error partitional
clustering method—was used here because it represents the clus-
ters in a probability-weighted fashion, so that a point has a chance
of belonging to more than one cluster. The EM algorithm is a
general method of finding the maximum-likelihood estimates
共MLEs兲 of parameters in probabilistic models 共Bilmes 1998兲. The
number of clusters in the model is determined by the Bayesian
information criterion 共BIC兲 共Fraley and Raftery 1998兲.
For each of the 339 gauges of the database and each month,
the daily precipitation was systematically disaggregated using
each of the 339 other gauges 共i.e., autodisaggregation was in-
cluded兲, and statistics of the disaggregated time series 共i.e., prob-
ability of zero rainfall, variance, and lag one-hour autocorrelation
coefficient兲 were then calculated for each month. The perfor-
mance of a given disaggregation database was quantified as the
difference between the statistics of the measured hourly data at a
given gauge and the statistics of the time series obtained when
RRSE r2 b0 b1
0.257 0.998 −0.086 1.087
0.723 0.528 0.093 mm2 0.445
1.083 0.214 0.147 0.291
0.474 0.856 0.218 0.780
0.603 0.765 0.333 mm2 0.562
1.472 −0.906 0.066 0.296
disaggregating it using another gauge. Thus, an array of 339 dis-
aggregated gauges⫻339 disaggregating gauges⫻3 statistics⫻12
months was created.
Regional Trends
For each disaggregated gauge and month, a cluster analysis was
conducted using the error measures associated with using each of
the 339 gauges as disaggregation databases as cluster variables.
As a result, clusters of disaggregating gauges with similar levels
of performance were defined. As an example, Fig. 5 shows the
clusters for disaggregating a gauge located in south-central Texas
for the month of February. By inspection of the cluster results, the
clusters did not group good-performance gauges 共i.e., gauges with
all performance measures comparable to the autodisaggregation
results兲, but rather grouped gauges of similar levels of error 共e.g.,
high value of one performance measure and low value of an-
other兲. Additionally, as evidenced in the figure, the clusters were
distributed without a spatial pattern, and no regional groups of
gauges with similar performance for disaggregation could be in-
ferred from the cluster analysis. Similar results were obtained for
all months of the year.
Trends in Gauge Characteristics
The underlying assumption in the analysis of gauge characteris-
tics as a criterion for selecting disaggregation databases is that
gauges that perform well for disaggregating a given location will
have similar statistics for their measured hourly rainfall. Again,
for each disaggregated gauge and month, a cluster analysis was
conducted, but this time using the performance measures and the
measured variance and lag one-hour serial correlation coefficient
of the hourly data at the disaggregation gauge as cluster variables.
The measured probability of zero rainfall was not used because its
range is comparatively narrower than that of the variance and the
one-hour lag autocorrelation coefficient, and its use would have
yielded a single cluster. As an example, Table 2 shows the clusters
defined for disaggregating a gauge located in the Texas panhandle
in August. As in the previous case, the clusters did not group
together good-performance gauges, and no relationships between
measured rainfall statistics and performance errors of the disag-
gregated data were found.
Proximity Trends
To evaluate whether nearby gauges perform better than gauges
farther away, the gauges with all three error statistics lower than
JOURNAL OF HYDROLOGIC ENGINEERING © ASCE / JUNE 2008 / 481
Fig. 4. Comparison between the statistics of the autodisaggregated time series and the measured hourly data. Dotted lines represent the 1:1
correspondence line 共perfect model兲 and the solid lines show the linear regression model. Typical scatter among the 30 disaggregation runs are
shown by error bars for one data point.

the autodisaggregation error statistics multiplied by 1, 1.5, 2, and
3 were plotted together with the disaggregated gauge. Fig. 6
shows the case with a multiplication factor of 3 for disaggregating
a gauge in south Texas in February in which the good-
performance gauge databases are scattered all over Texas; no
pattern with the distance to the disaggregated gage is observed.
Similar results are obtained for other gauges and months. This
lack of proximity trend implies that the nearby gauge stations are
not necessarily the best for rainfall disaggregation.
State of Texas Storms Database
Based on the above trend analysis, storm databases with good
disaggregation performance for disaggregating a given gauge
were not located in any specific region, did not have any specific
measured statistics of their hourly data, and were not necessarily
the closest gauges. Probably the most important reason for this
result is that each individual gauge does not have enough data to
fully reconstruct the monthly CDFs of event depth. Given that
there were always gauges scattered throughout Texas that per-

482 / JOURNAL OF HYDROLOGIC ENGINEERING © ASCE / JUNE 2008

Fig. 5. Scatter plot of clusters in February for identification of
successful disaggregation gauges based on analysis of the three
performance statistics 共P0, ␴2, and ␳1兲. Bold cross in the south-central
part of Texas is the location of the gauge being disaggregated; each
of the other symbols is at the location of potential disaggregation
databases. Each symbol type represents the members of the each of
three different clusters.
formed nearly as well as the autodisaggregation process, a single
Texas precipitation database that stores the precipitation data of
all 339 stations is proposed so that higher resolution in the
monthly CDFs can be realized. This rather unexpected result in-
dicates that storm structure does not change much across Texas.
Although the occurrence of storms is known to vary significantly
共in general, east Texas is wetter than west Texas兲, when storms
occur, they are typically thunder showers in summer and frontal
systems in winter, and the intensity structure of events remains
similar. To test this hypothesis, we investigated the distribution of
rainfall throughout the day at each of the 23 gauges identified for
model validation. Fig. 7 plots the fraction of total daily rainfall
occurring for the largest 1 h, 6 h, and 12 h duration storm events.
For the 1 h duration, there is a very weak trend from east to west,
but the variation in the data from day-to-day indicated by one
standard deviation from the mean is much greater than the trend.
Longer durations show weaker trends. Thus, storm structure ap-
pears consistent across Texas.
To test the State of Texas storms database, all of the 23 gauges
reserved for validation were disaggregated using the lumped da-
tabase, and the results are presented below in the “Application”
section. This database stored an overall total of 12,161 years of
data and nearly 1 million storm events. The use of this Texas
database implies that, regardless of the actual daily precipitation
Table 2. Cluster Analysis Results for Evaluation of Good Performance Gauge Characteristics
Measured statistics
␴2
Cluster 共mm2兲 ␳1
1 1.645 0.183
2 0.840 0.272
3 1.117 0.298
Note: Variable m reports the number of gauges grouped in each of the three clusters.
Fig. 6. Scatter plot of disaggregation databases having good
performance for disaggregating a gauge in southwest Texas in
February. Bold cross in the west-central part of Texas is the location
of the gauge being disaggregated; each of the other symbols is at the
location of potential disaggregation databases. The open symbols are
for gauges that did not meet the specified performance standard;
whereas, the filled symbols did meet the performance standard that
the error statistics for the disaggregation database were within three
times the errors of the autodisaggregated time series.
depths, when it rains, the daily precipitation variability follows
common patterns for each month, and a single database can be
used for disaggregation across Texas.
Application: Validation of Disaggregation Method
across Texas
A set of 23 randomly-selected rain gauges was used for validation
of the disaggregation method using the State of Texas storms
database. Fig. 8 shows an example of the performance for a gauge
in southeast Texas. In the figure, the performance of the State of
Texas storms database tracks well with the performance of the
autodisaggregated data. Examination of their monthly statistics
shows that the model performs remarkably well on the zero-
rainfall probability 共errors less than 2%兲. Likewise, it is observed
that for the variance, the verification performed better or equal to
the autodisaggregation. Since the autodisaggregation results only
give the best performance that can be expected and not the per-
formance that may be realized, the improvement using the State
of Texas database does not invalidate the performance metrics
based on the autodisaggregation results. Both verification and au-
Error of modeled statistics
␴2
P0 共mm2兲 ␳1 m
−0.004 0.198 0.137 45
−0.005 0.300 0.106 193
−0.005 0.180 0.049 85
JOURNAL OF HYDROLOGIC ENGINEERING © ASCE / JUNE 2008 / 483

Fig. 7. Distribution of rainfall throughout the day for three different
durations and for all 23 hourly recording gauges identified for
validation. Filled dots plot the average values over all days and the
error bars plot plus and minus one standard deviation of the daily
values.
todisaggregation had some difficulty replicating the lag one-hour
autocorrelation coefficients, most of which were underpredicted.
Here, the validation results are poorer than the autodisaggregation
results, though within the range of natural variability indicated by
the error bars at this gauge. Moreover, for all these statistics, the
model performed similarly overall to the autodisaggregation re-
sults, implying the errors are an inherited error of the method and
not of the Texas database.
Fig. 9 shows the model performance for all 23 of the valida-
tion gauges; the fit statistics are reported in Table 3. The success
or failure of the Texas storms database and the disaggregation
model verification is evaluated by comparison to Fig. 4 and Table
1, where the results for the autodisaggregation process are shown.
Slightly more scatter in the probability of zero rainfall is observed
in the verification, but the match is still quite close, having r2
values of 0.96 and 0.75 for February and August respectively, for
the validation data. For the variance, all of the performance mea-
sures are better in the validation data than for the auto-
disaggregation results. This is due to the fact that relatively low
measured variance gauges, where the model performs better, were
included in the verification. As seen in Fig. 4, it is the few mea-
sured variances in excess of 2 mm2 that cause the high bias and
scatter in the autodisaggregation results. If a comparison is made
for measured variances less than 2 mm2, the autodisaggregation
time series perform slightly better than the validation results, but
484 / JOURNAL OF HYDROLOGIC ENGINEERING © ASCE / JUNE 2008
Fig. 8. Performance of the State of Texas storms database for disag-
gregating a validation gauge in southeast Texas 共NCDC gauge 4300
located at 29.9925° N, 95.363889° W兲. Solid bold line with error bars
plots the statistics of the measured hourly precipitation with plus and
minus one standard deviation of the monthly variability. Dotted line
plots the results of the autodisaggregation process; thin solid line
plots the results of disaggregation using the State of Texas storms
database.
the agreement is good for both data sets. The lag one-hour serial
correlation coefficient performs similarly in both data sets, with
weaker agreement and greater bias in the validation time series.
From these validation gauge results, our hypothesis that a State of
Texas storms database can be used to disaggregate daily rainfall is
confirmed. This fact makes application of the stochastic storm
selection method for disaggregation of daily rainfall straightfor-
ward, as there is no need to justify which hourly database will be
used in the disaggregation. Combining the Texas storms database
with the monthly values of ␧ from Fig. 3, the stochastic storms
selection method can be directly applied to disaggregate daily
rainfall throughout Texas.
As stated in the introduction, the primary goal of this paper is
to generate hourly precipitation time series that can be used to
calibrate and verify continuous simulation watershed models. To
this end, two characteristics of the disaggregated time series are
important: Whether the method accurately captures the majority
of rainfall intensities correctly and whether the model captures the
extreme runoff-generating storm events correctly. Fig. 10 shows
the rainfall intensity versus the percent of the time a given inten-
sity is exceeded for both the measured and simulated time series
for a typical validation gauge in central Texas. For the validation
gauge shown, the probability of zero rainfall and the lower inten-
sity values are matched very closely. Note the log scale used in
Fig. 9. Comparison between the statistics of the time series disaggregated using the Texas State database and the measured hourly data for each
of the validation gauges. Dotted lines represent the 1:1 correspondence line 共perfect model兲 and solid lines show the linear regression model.
Typical scatter among the 30 disaggregation runs are shown by error bars for each data point.

Table 3. Performance Measures between the Time Series Disaggregated Using the State of Texas Database and the Measured Statistics of Hourly Rainfall
for Each of the Validation Gauges. Rainfall Statistics Are the Probability of Zero Rainfall P0, Variance of Hourly Rainfall ␴2, and Lag One-Hour Serial
Correlation Coefficient ␳1. Performance Measures Are the Mean Absolute Error 共MAE兲, Root Relative Square Error 共RRSE兲, Intercept b0 and Slope b1 of
the Linear Regression between the Modeled and Measured Statistics, and Coefficient of Determination r2 of the Linear Regression Model.
Month Statistic MAE RRSE r2 b0 b1
February P0 0.006 0.457 0.962 0.174 0.822
␴2 0.160 mm2 0.602 0.685 0.015 mm2 0.642
␳1 0.137 1.181 −0.158 0.240 0.023
August P0 0.004 0.578 0.743 0.296 0.701
␴2 0.239 mm2 0.503 0.808 0.339 mm2 0.602
␳1 0.098 1.943 −2.307 0.078 0.258

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Fig. 10. Intensity versus percent exceedance curves for a typical
validation gauge in central Texas 共NCDC gauge 7943 located at
31.3514° N, 100.4939° W兲. The solid line presents results for the
measured hourly data; the dotted line gives the results for the
simulated hourly time series.
the figures and that because of the high probability of zero rain-
fall, the modeled and simulated data are nearly identical for 98%
of the time. Rainfall events in this range are often infiltration
events and are needed in water balance models to track soil mois-
ture. As the intensity increases above the 2% exceedance prob-
ability, the results diverge, with the simulated data slightly
overestimating the maximum intensity by up to 17% in the figure.
The correspondence of the curves for the great majority of the
time, however, suggest that the simulated time series can be used
to track most runoff events in continuous simulation.
To see how the simulated data handle extreme events, Fig. 11
summarizes the annual one-hour maximum intensity events for all
validation gauges and for all years in their periods of record. For
events below about 75 mm/ h, the simulated intensities track the
measured data quite well, with limited bias. Above 75 mm/ h, the
simulated data systematically underpredict the extreme one-hour
intensities, and this is seen by the low slope of the solid regres-
sion line in the figure. On the one hand, these results show that
Fig. 11. Annual maximum intensity for all 23 validation gauges for
the measured hourly precipitation and the simulated hourly time
series using the State of Texas storms database
486 / JOURNAL OF HYDROLOGIC ENGINEERING © ASCE / JUNE 2008
the disaggregated time series may underpredict the intensity of
the yearly extreme runoff generating events, while on the other
hand, these results are encouraging in that they show that sum-
ming overlapping storms does not systematically lead to overpre-
diction of the highest intensity rainfall events. Given that this
one-parameter model closely tracks the vast majority of intensi-
ties 共Fig. 10兲 and that for most years, when the maximum one-
hour intensity is below 75 mm/ h, the simulated data predict well
the highest intensity events 共Fig. 11兲, this performance of the
disaggregation method is promising.
Summary and Conclusions
The stochastic storm selection method has been evaluated for
disaggregating daily data into hourly precipitation across Texas.
The autodisaggregation of historic hourly rainfall in Texas pro-
vides both the calibrated value of the method parameter ␧ in
Texas and a guideline for the best expected performance of the
model. By spatial fitting of the ␧ parameter values, no significant
spatial trends are found. Moreover, ␧ follows a seasonal variabil-
ity from low values in the winter corresponding to frontal system
storms and higher values in the summer corresponding to convec-
tive thunder showers. The autodisaggregation performance is
good for the probability of zero rainfall and for the variance for
gauges with low measured values of variance. Both high variance
and high lag one-hour autocorrelation coefficient are systemati-
cally underestimated by the method.
Selection of the appropriate hourly database to use in disag-
gregation was evaluated using cluster and spatial data analysis.
Using the autodisaggregated data, no trends were found either in
the spatial distribution of good databases or in their modeled or
measured characteristics 共e.g., ␧ values or rainfall statistics兲.
Based on this analysis, we conclude that a single hourly database
containing all the measured precipitation in Texas can be used for
disaggregation. Several gauges were selected for verification, and
these gauges confirmed that the state database performed nearly
as well as the autodisaggregation 共typically within a factor of
two兲. Hence, errors using the Texas state database are due to
systematic method errors and not due to using unrepresentative
rainfall intensity patterns in the disaggregation database.
From a practical point of view, this study provides the analysis
needed to apply the stochastic storm selection method across
Texas and the guidance needed to evaluate other locations. The
average monthly values of ␧ can be used for the single model
parameter irrespective of location; the State of Texas storms da-
tabase can be used as the hourly off-site database. When applied
in this way, the performance of the model can be expected to lie
within a factor of two of the autodisaggregation performance.
When this method is applied across the United States, we expect
to find a limited number of similar regional databases and similar
large regions of uniform ␧ values.
When applied to a hydrologic study, the disaggregation
scheme provides very good intensity-exceedance curves. The
curves match very closely the majority of moderate rainfall
events. This match is critical for accurate tracking of soil moisture
in water balance models. The curves both over- and underpredict
the extreme runoff-generating events, with systematic underpre-
diction for events above 75 mm/ h, but they are still matched
closely for most years.
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