A well-designed rain gauge network can provide precise and detailed rainfall data for earth science research; meanwhile, satellite precipitation data has been developed to generate more real spatial features, which provides new data support for the improvement of ground station network design methods. In this paper, satellite precipitation data are introduced into the design of a rain gauge network and an optimized method for designing a rain gauge network that comprehensively considers the information content, spatiotemporality, and accuracy (ISA) of the data is proposed. After screening the potential stations, the average spatial information index of the rain gauge network, which is calculated from remote sensing data, is used to address the shortcomings of applying spatial information from single-use measurement data. Then, the greedy ranking algorithm is used to rank the order in which the rain gauges are added to the network. The results of the rain gauge network design in the upper reaches of the Chaobai river show that compared with two methods that do not consider spatiality or use only measured data to consider spatiality, the proposed method performs better in terms of the spatial layout and accuracy verification. This study provides new ideas and references for the design of hydrological station networks and explores the use of remote sensing data for the layout of ground-based station networks.

A reasonable rain gauge network layout can provide accurate regional rainfall data and effectively support the monitoring, development and utilization of water resources. Currently, an increasing number of network design methods based on entropy targets are being applied to network design. The discretization of data is a common method of obtaining the probability in calculations of information entropy. To study the application of different discretization methods and different entropy-based methods in the design of rain gauge networks, this paper compares and analyzes 9 design results for rainy season rain gauge networks using three commonly used discretization methods (A1, SC and ST) and three entropy-based network design algorithms (MIMR, HT and HC) from three perspectives: the joint entropy, spatiality, and accuracy of the network, as evaluation indices. The results show that the variation in network information calculated by the A1 and ST methods for rainy season rain gauge data is too large or too small compared to that calculated by the SC method, and also that the MIMR method performs better in terms of spatiality and accuracy than the HC and HT methods. The comparative analysis results provide a reference for the selection of discrete methods and entropy-based objectives in rain gauge network design, and provides a way to explore a more suitable rain gauge network layout scheme.