Hi Eleanor,
I understand that you have hourly precipitation data in which you want to determine the number of rainfall events and the amount of rain per-rainfall event in MATLAB.
Besides, as per my understanding, It is also understood that there should be a minimum of 6 dry hours between any two rainfall events.
It is assumed that you have hourly rainfall data for a month stored in an array called "rain" with a size of 24*30. The maximum number of rainfall events in a month occur when rainfall and no-rainfall events alternate every 6 hours. Therefore, as an optimization here, you can pre-allocate an array called "amtRainArr" with a size of (2430)/12 to store the amount of rain received.
Further, to address the issue of determining the number of rainfall events and the rainfall amount per event, you can refer to the below documented code snippet which attempts to solve the problem using the "two pointers approach" –
%Hourly rainfall data
rain = zeros(1,24*30);
%iterator over the rain array
curr =1;
%iterator to keep track of last rain hour before current hour
last =-6;
%arr to store rain amount per rain event
amtRainArr =zeros(length(rain)/12);
%iterator over amtRainArr
idx =0;
%Loop over the "rain" array
for curr=1:length(rain)
if(rain(curr)~=0)
%In the hours it rains,
%Check whether the current hour falls in the previous rainfall event.
if(curr-last>5)
%if the duration between two consecutive rain hours is > 5
%The current hour marks the begining of new rainfall event
idx=idx+1;
amtRainArr(idx)=rain(curr);
last=curr;
else
%The current rain hour is a part of previous rainfall event
%Add current rainfall amount to amtRainArr
amtRainArr(idx)=amtRainArr(idx)+rain(curr);
end
end
end
I hope you find the provided solution useful, and this helps you correctly determine the number of rainfall events and the amount of rain per-rainfall event.
Regards,
Vinayak Luha
