Although the Alps have the densest network of precipitation stations among world's mountain areas, detail knowledge of precipitation conditions is still lacking. This is evidenced by microlevel studies, which confirm assumptions of much higher precipitation gradients in mountain areas than in lowland areas. Due to higher windiness and higher proportion of solid precipitation the measurements of precipitation in mountains is affected by high measurement error. This leads to insufficient knowledge about precipitation amount, which further leads to many uncertainties, such as in assessing the risk of avalanches. The paper discusses the results of measurements of precipitation in the Alpine valleys, on the basis of which we calculated horizontal precipitation gradients. The uncertainty of scale parameter evaluated on a single station dataset is much higher than the uncertainty of the location parameter. We reduced this uncertainty of the scale parameter with mapping the ratio of scale and location parameters as we assume almost stationary values of the ratio on a regional level. Kriging steps used were the same as for location parameter. Gridded values of scale parameter were then calculated by multiplying the maps of location parameter and the ratio.
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