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I wanted to interpolate my daily rainfall data into ArcGIS for visual representation. I have almost 10 years of daily rainfall data which contains lots of zeros. When I take the average daily for each station, the resulting number is quite low, obviously.
Is there any other statistical technique to calculate the average of such kind of data?
Maybe I'm just not getting it - but why are you surprised that a 'zero inflated' dataset will provide low averages of daily precipitation?
Perhaps consider using a different measure of what you want to show based on your research question. I.e., if you want to show, which region is less arid than others try calculating precipitation sums and interpolate based on these. Alternatively do not calculate the mean, but rather the mode (the value that occurs most, but that would also likely be 0) or the median (the middle value of all values in a station).
I would suggest doing these calculations before starting with the GIS work. I prefer R, but MS Excel also does the job.
