Abstract
Abstract. The following research explores the feasibility of building effective design storms for extreme hydrological regimes, such as the one which characterizes the rainfall regime of the east and south-east of the Iberian Peninsula, without employing intensity–duration–frequency (IDF) curves as a starting point. Nowadays, after decades of functioning hydrological automatic networks, there is an abundance of high-resolution rainfall data with a reasonable statistic representation, which enable the direct research of temporal patterns and inner structures of rainfall events at a given geographic location, with the aim of establishing a statistical synthesis directly based on those observed patterns. The authors propose a temporal design storm defined in analytical terms, through a two-parameter gamma-type function. The two parameters are directly estimated from 73 independent storms identified from rainfall records of high temporal resolution in Valencia (Spain). All the relevant analytical properties derived from that function are developed in order to use this storm in real applications. In particular, in order to assign a probability to the design storm (return period), an auxiliary variable combining maximum intensity and total cumulated rainfall is introduced. As a result, for a given return period, a set of three storms with different duration, depth and peak intensity are defined. The consistency of the results is verified by means of comparison with the classic method of alternating blocks based on an IDF curve, for the above mentioned study case.
Highlights
Design storms are of paramount importance for hydrologic engineering and remain mainstream practice as they provide a simple and apparently appropriate tool for the design of hydraulic infrastructure
The need for design storms in hydrologic engineering must be analysed according to the spatial scale of the problem, which might range from typical urban drainage designs to small and intermediate catchment basins
In many European and North and South American countries, they are directly obtained from IDF curves, which are usually pre-established for a given area
Summary
Design storms are of paramount importance for hydrologic engineering and remain mainstream practice as they provide a simple and apparently appropriate tool for the design of hydraulic infrastructure. Results led to the AES design storm (Hogg, 1982), widely used in urban drainage design The former design storm reproduces the maximum intensity, the time of this maximum and the rainfall depth that occurs before the peak on the basis of observed records. The objective is to formulate an analytical approach in order to describe rainfall intensities in time, as an alternative for practical design storm definition in Mediterranean areas Another aim is to develop all required analytical properties to ensure their applicability under usual criteria and requirements of design storm approaches for hydrological design. These include a methodology for return period assignment based on both total depth and peak intensity of the storm.
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