Case Study of Applying Multifractal Models for Rainfall IDF Analysis in China

Abstract

AbstractRainfall intensity-duration-frequency (IDF) curves are one of the most commonly used tools in water resources engineering. Two multifractal rainfall models with multifractal behavior are used to estimate IDF curves in this paper. The models are composed of exterior and interior processes with constant duration D and “bare” intensity ID′. Using high resolution data of rainfall, previous research concluded that the results of the IDF curves tend to be insensitive to the length of data record. In this paper, six years of rainfall data at a 5-min resolution at two stations (Nan Xiong and Ai Zi), Guangdong province, China, are analyzed with the multifractal models to estimate IDF curves. Compared with the traditional parametric models for determining IDF curves, the multifractal approach reduces the amount of parameters required to be calculated, and six years of high resolution rainfall data are sufficient to estimate the IDF curves. Forty-six years of annual maxima rainfall data for different duratio...