Thiessen Polygon Method

1. Weights in proportion to area, and in relatively flat, stable areas gives good results. Once the
initial process is completed and the weights determined, it is easy to produce results. Typically
used in some form or another in almost all current models whether by area or mathematical and
statistical error analysis.

2. Represents no physical process such as orography, elevation, aspect, orientation, etc. If you add
or delete a station, you must recompute the entire process and if your model is calibrated using it,
you will most likely have to recalibrate. If the watershed is large and the areas very close in
percent of the total, then it essentially becomes an arithemetic average, so the number of stations
per area becomes important. If the basin is small, it may have no stations at all and simply
becomes a hanger from another, larger basin.

Isohyetal method - pros and cons

1. In the hands of a skilled expert, is supposedly very accurate and accounts for orography and
terrain and aspect and orientation and all the things the others cannot. However, who or what can
verify the actual? The premise, is based on physical processes and over the long run, many
storms, should be more accurate. I have never met such a skilled expert, because it is usually
done only for research, in the past tense and on limited temporal and spatial scales.

2. It is time consuming, laborious, mind numbing and highly subjective. It requires a great deal of
knowledge about the watershed and its physical characteristics. It requires a great deal of
knowledge about the individual storm, its dynamics, intensity, duration, precipitable water,
temperature profiles and winds. Otherwise, it breaks down to an analysis of elevation.

Bottom line - isohyetal analysis is just not routinely done in the manner described. It is routinely
done via computer using any number of programs that will fit isoheyetal lines to a data set. In this case,
there is no weight given to physical processes - orographics, storm direction, etc. It is a simple fit of
observed data and if your data set in not fine enough in both the geographical and temporal sense, gross
misrepresentations of data may occur, especially in areas of large elevation differences - the mountains.