Evaluating critical rainfall and catchment scale influence on hydrological response in urban areas

Abstract

Rainfall spatial and temporal variability are key points in the prediction of hydrological response. At the same time, catchment scale and characteristics also play important roles, especially in urban areas, where the high level of imperviousness combined with intense and localised rainfall causes fast responses (Ochoa-Rodriguez et al., 2015). New instruments such as weather radars have been developed in recent decades able to better capture the spatial and temporal variability of storm events. At the same time, large improvements have been made to create high-resolution hydrological models that are able to represent the catchment with a high level of detail. However, the interactions between rainfall and catchment variability and their effects on the hydrological response remains poorly understood. In this work, we aim to evaluate the critical space and time scales that characterize rainfall variability and catchment characteristics in relation to hydrological response in urban areas. Critical scales based on dimensionless parameters developed in a previous work (Cristiano et al, 2018) will be evaluated for two urban areas in different climatological regions, one in Europe and one in the US.