A new framework for multi-site weather generator: a two-stage model combining a parametric method with a distribution-free shuffle procedure

Keeping the spatial correlation of synthetic precipitation data is of utmost importance for hydrological modeling; however, most present weather generators are single-site models and ignore the spatial dependence in daily weather data. Multi-site weather generator is an effective method to solve this problem. This study proposes a new framework for multi-site weather generator denoted as two-stage weather generator (TSWG), in which the first stage generates the single-site precipitation occurrence and amount with a parametric chain-dependent process, and the second stage rebuilds the spatial correlation of the synthetic data using a post-processing, distribution-free shuffle procedure. Results show that TSWG reproduces the statistical parameters of the parametric stage quite well, such as wet days and precipitation amount, and it almost perfectly preserves the inter-station correlations of precipitation occurrence and amount as well as their dependences. Most important, it matches the input requirement of hydrological model and gives satisfactory hydrological simulations. There are several advantages for this new framework: (1) only one correlation matrix and two simple steps, no more input variables or iterative optimizations, are needed to rebuild the spatial correlation; (2) the statistical parameters of the observed data can be easily preserved; (3) the inter-station correlations can be satisfactorily rebuilt. As a post-processing method, the shuffle procedure used to reconstruct the spatial correlation has some potential extensions, such as turning current single-site weather generator into multi-site models and generating future multi-site climate scenarios.