A technical note on short-duration rainfall in central Italy

Abstract

Short duration and high intensity rainfalls are of great importance in the study and modeling of hydrological phenomena in the urban area in general, with particular reference to design and evaluation of hydraulic works. Indeed, in urban watersheds, whose times are almost always less than 60 minutes, the estimate of extreme values of rainfall depth at high time resolutions (short duration) is crucial. In this paper an investigation on short-duration rainfalls is carried out by analyzing the rainfall data of six rain gauges in the Lazio region in central Italy. According to two approaches known in literature, Depth-Duration-Frequency curves are evaluated for the investigated rain gauges and, limited to the statistical representativeness of the sample data, not negligible differences with the respective estimated rainfall values have been found.