Spatial climate variation pattern and regional prediction of rainfall in Jordan

Currently Jordan is facing various water problems accompanied by rapid population growth, urbanisation and industrialisation. It is of outmost importance to search for water resources augmentation possibilities leading to decision-making procedures by addressing the rainfall sources as the main water resources in Jordan, through refined techniques. Point cumulative semivariogram (PCSV) samples are analysed in order to identify the regional dependence of the rainfall phenomena. Amman station is taken as a pivot site because of its location in the centre of the Kingdom, where the samples of the PCSV are calculated for eight systematic directions. Standard regional dependence function (SRDF) is obtained from the sample PCSV and the weighted average procedure is applied with the help of SRDF to predict the rainfall amounts. The radius of rainfall influence is determined for Amman in each direction. The cross-validation methods are used to predict the rainfall in Amman using different samples representing along each direction. The result of cross-validation method is acceptable in all samples with relative error not exceeding 10%, except in the desert sides where larger errors indicate weak regional dependence.