Evaluation of the Impact of Gap Filling Technology in Precipitation Series on the Estimation of Climate Trends, the Case of the Souss Massa Watershed

Abstract

Accurate climatic data, especially precipitation measurements, play a critical role in various studies concerning the water cycle, particularly in modeling flood and drought risks. Unfortunately, these datasets often suffer from temporary gaps that are randomly dispersed over time. This study aims to assess the effectiveness of three imputation methods: KNN, MICE, and missForest, in impute missing values in climate series. The evaluation is conducted in two distinct rainfall regimes: the Moulouya basin and the Sous Massa basin. The performance analysis considers the percentage of missing data across the entire dataset. The imputed datasets are used to estimate annual precipitation, which are then subjected to statistical tests to identify potential trends and detect changepoints. The analysis focuses on the precipitation series within the Souss Massa watershed, encompassing 27 rainfall stations. Results indicate that data imputation has a highly positive impact on the study of rainfall series trends and change point detection. The study found that studying trends without data imputation could lead to questionable conclusions. The most significant breakpoints detected in the analyzed rainfall series were in the years 1988, 1991, 1997, 2007, and 2010. The decrease in precipitation at stations showing a downward trend varies between -60 mm and -137 mm using the MICE method, and between -40 mm and 186 mm using the MissForest method.