Influence of Changes of Catchment Permeability and Frequency of Rainfall on Critical Storm Duration in an Urbanized Catchment—A Case Study, Cracow, Poland

Abstract

The increase of impermeable areas in a catchment is known to elevate flood risk. To adequately understand and plan for these risks, changes in the basin water cycle must be quantified as imperviousness increases, requiring the use of hydrological modeling to obtain design runoff volumes and peak flow rates. A key stage of modeling is adopting the structure of the model and estimating its parameters. Due to the fact that most impervious basins are uncontrolled, hydrological models that do not require parameter calibration are advantageous. At the same time, it should be remembered that these models are sensitive to the values of assumed parameters. The purpose of this work is to determine the effect of catchment impermeability on the flow variability in the Sudół Dominikański stream in Cracow, Poland, and assess the influence of the frequency of rainfall on values of time of concentration (here it is meant as critical storm duration). The major finding in this work is that the critical storm duration for all different scenarios of catchment imperviousness depends on the rainfall exceedance probability. In the case of rainfall probability lower than 5.0%, the critical storm duration was equal to 2 h, for higher probabilities (p ≥ 50%) it was equal to 24 h. Simulations showed that the increase of impermeable areas caused peak time abbreviation. In the case of rainfall with exceedance probability p = 1.0% and critical storm duration Dkr = 2 h, the peak time decreased about 12.5% and for impermeable areas increased from 22.01 to 44.95%.