Spatial Modelling of Temperature and Humidity using Systems of Stochastic Partial Differential Equations

Abstract

This work is motivated by constructing a weather simulator for precipitation. Temperature and humidity are two of the most important driving forces of precipitation, and the strategy is to have a stochastic model for temperature and humidity, and use a deterministic model to go from these variables to precipitation. Temperature and humidity are empirically positively correlated. Generally speaking, if variables are empirically dependent, then multivariate models should be considered. In this work we model humidity and temperature in southern Norway. We want to construct bivariate Gaussian random fields (GRFs) based on this dataset. The aim of our work is to use the bivariate GRFs to capture both the dependence structure between humidity and temperature as well as their spatial dependencies. One important feature for the dataset is that the humidity and temperature are not necessarily observed at the same locations. Both univariate and bivariate spatial models are fitted and compared. For modeling and inference the SPDE approach for univariate models and the systems of SPDEs approach for multivariate models have been used. To evaluate the performance of the difference between the univariate and bivariate models, we compare predictive performance using some commonly used scoring rules: mean absolute error, mean-square error and continuous ranked probability score. The results illustrate that we can capture strong positive correlation between the temperature and the humidity. Furthermore, the results also agree with the physical or empirical knowledge. At the end, we conclude that using the bivariate GRFs to model this dataset is superior to the approach with independent univariate GRFs both when evaluating point predictions and for quantifying prediction uncertainty.