Simulation of rainfall events for design purposes with inadequate data

D. Koutsoyiannis, and D. Zarris, Simulation of rainfall events for design purposes with inadequate data, 24th General Assembly of the European Geophysical Society, Geophysical Research Abstracts, Vol. 1, The Hague, 296, doi:10.13140/RG.2.1.2797.8482, European Geophysical Society, 1999.

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[English]

Recently, the new concept of using continuous simulation in hydraulic design attracts interest. However, the absence of long rainfall records with appropriate temporal resolution, coupled with the requirement of simulating a vast number of synthetic events to calculate the flood peak for a given exceedance probability have become a barrier to the use of such approaches. Therefore, the use of design storms based on local intensity-duration-frequency (IDF) curves remains at present the most popular method not only for its simplicity but mainly because most frequently the IDF curves represent the only available information on local rainfall. Also, IDF based approaches assure the reproduction of rainfall extremes whereas continuous simulation models may fail to do so. An intermediate method lying in between the traditional design storm approach and the continuous simulation approach is presented. The method is based on, and uses as the only input, the IDF curves of a particular catchment. The main concept is to keep the design storm approach for the determination of the total characteristics of the design storm event, extracted from the IDF curves, and use a disaggregation technique to generate an ensemble of alternative hyetographs. The stochastically generated hyetographs are then entered into a rainfall - runoff model and then routed through the hydrosystem in order to simulate its hydraulic performance. The proposed method is demonstrated via examples involving sewer systems and dam spillways.

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See also: http://dx.doi.org/10.13140/RG.2.1.2797.8482

Related works:

Our works that reference this work:

1. D. Koutsoyiannis, and N. Mamassis, On the representation of hyetograph characteristics by stochastic rainfall models, Journal of Hydrology, 251, 65–87, 2001.

Other works that reference this work (this list might be obsolete):

1. Keller Filho, T., J. Zullo Jr. and P.R.S.D.R. Lima, Analysis of the transition between dry and wet days through third-order Markov chains, Pesquisa Agropecuaria Brasileira, 41(9), 1341-1349, 2006.
2. Blanc, J., J. W. Hall, N. Roche, R. J. Dawson, Y. Cesses, A. Burton and C. G. Kilsby, Enhanced efficiency of pluvial flood risk estimation in urban areas using spatial-temporal rainfall simulations, Journal of Flood Risk Management, 5 (2), 143-152, 2012.