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Abstract
Rain gauges can offer high quality rainfall measurements at their location. Networks of rain gauges can offer better insight into the space-time variability of rainfall, but they tend to be too widely spaced for accurate estimates between points. While other remote sensing systems, like radar and microwave links, exist for rain measurements that offer good insight in the spatial variability on rainfall they tend to have more problems in identifying the correct rain amounts at the ground. A way to estimate the variability of rainfall between gauge points is to interpolate between them using fitted variograms. If a dense rain gauge network is lacking it is difficult to create accurate variograms. Using a dataset of 14-year daily rain accumulation gathered at 35 automatic weather stations operated by KNMI and a one-year data of 30 gauges in a dense network in a radius of 10 km around CESAR (Cabauw Experimental Site for Atmospheric Research), this article shows a highly seasonal variation of semi-variograms in the Netherlands and offers a way for estimating rainfall in-between rain gauge locations using the sill and range found with a fitted climatological spherical variogram for applications in small-scale (urban) catchment hydrology. Variograms at short range during winter and spring tend be underestimated, but summer and autumn are well predicted.