4.4.2. Comparison of the ST-RK and ST-DK with Adaptive Coefficient Drift Function
Since trends are assumed to be changing across time in the present case, the procedure to compute overall correlation coefficients therefore differs from the fixed coefficients case. Here, monthly correlation coefficients between variables are averaged to obtain an overall correlation. A highly positive correlated relationship is marked between temperature and air pressure, with a correlation coefficient exceeding 0.8. The DEM variable is also included in the drift function for both temperature and air pressure estimations as the absolute values of correlation coefficients are greater than 0.5.
Table 3.
Monthly means of Pearson correlation coefficients between candidate auxiliary and target variables.
Table 3.
Monthly means of Pearson correlation coefficients between candidate auxiliary and target variables.
Variable |
Temperature |
Air Pressure |
Temperature |
1.0000 |
0.8021 |
Air Pressure |
0.8021 |
1.0000 |
Relative Humidity |
-0.0710 |
0.3432 |
DEM |
-0.5907 |
-0.7608 |
Therefore, we define the drift function based on the selected auxiliary variables for temperature estimation. In this work, we define two such functions below, utilizing the variable definitions stated in the previous subsection. The first function is formulated as:
where
and
for .
Furthermore, suppose that
, a second drift function is expressed as:
where
and
for .
For air pressure estimation, the drift function is formulated as:
where
and
for .
At each monthly time step, the unknown coefficients are identified through the application of the OLS method, as in the previous subsection.
Table 4 demonstrates the estimation performances of the AST-RK and AST-DK methods for temperature and air pressure based on the drift functions given in Equations (
30)-(
32). As evidenced by the RMSE and MAPE metrics, the AST-DK method with one and two auxiliary variables consistently outperform the AST-RK method for estimation of both target variables. In particular, the RMSE values attained from the AST-DK method with two auxiliary variables are 0.8336 for temperature and 10.5835 for air pressure, resulting in 12.5544% and 7.4256% improvement compared to the AST-RK method. Furthermore, the AST-RK and AST-DK methods with one auxiliary variable surpass the accuracy of the fixed-coefficient approaches presented in
Table 2.
Besides, the role of the adaptive coefficient drift function in the ST-DK method becomes apparent when considering temperature estimation with a single auxiliary variable. In the case of fixed coefficients, the ST-RK model yields higher accuracy estimates than the ST-DK, but the opposite scenario occurs for the adaptive coefficient schemes.
For illustration purposes, the spatial distribution maps of temperature and air pressure obtained from the AST-RK and AST-DK models are generated. The maps were gridded at a resolution of 0.05 degrees, corresponding to an approximate spatial area of 5.5
per grid cell. Thailand’s weather is divided into mainly three seasons; the summer season (March to May), the rainy season (May to October), and the winter season (November to February) [
47,
48]. One month of each season (March, July, and November) was performed to represent seasonal meteorological fluctuations across the country. The temperature variations across Thailand are visualized in
Figure 2. As can be seen in the figures, stronger temperature gradients are produced by the ST-DK method for all three representative months. A more dispersed distribution of high temperatures can be markedly observed in March from the north to the centre regions, as displayed in
Figure 2(a).
A comparison of air pressure distributions obtained from the AST-RK and AST-DK methods is presented in
Figure 3. The results of both methods show similar distribution patterns for March and November. A notable difference can be found in July, in which a relatively low air pressure produced by the AST-RK model is identified in the northern area as opposed to the AST-DK approach.