Abstract
Predicting rainfall can prevent and mitigate damages caused by its deficit or excess, besides providing necessary tools for adequate planning for the use of water. This research aimed to predict the monthly rainfall, one month in advance, in four municipalities in the metropolitan region of Belo Horizonte, using artificial neural networks (ANN) trained with different climate variables, and to indicate the suitability of such variables as inputs to these models. The models were developed through the MATLAB® software version R2011a, using the NNTOOL toolbox. The ANN’s were trained by the multilayer perceptron architecture and the Feedforward and Back propagation algorithm, using two combinations of input data were used, with 2 and 6 variables, and one combination of input data with 3 of the 6 variables most correlated to observed rainfall from 1970 to 1999, to predict the rainfall from 2000 to 2009. The most correlated variables to the rainfall of the following month are the sequential number corresponding to the month, total rainfall and average compensated temperature, and the best performance was obtained with these variables. Furthermore, it was concluded that the performance of the models was satisfactory; however, they presented limitations for predicting months with high rainfall.
STOCHASTIC MODELLING BASED MONTHLY RAINFALL PREDICTION USING SEASONAL ARTIFICIAL NEURAL NETWORKS
