Precipitation Intensity-Duration-Frequency Curves Under Changing Climate on Developing Urban Catchment – Aurangabad (Ms), India

Abstract

Storm water plays an important role in analysis, design and planning of drains in case of rapidly growing urbanization. The change in rainfall pattern and intensity is becoming a great concern for hydrologic engineers and planners. The rainfall Intensity-Duration-Frequency (IDF) curves are commonly used in storm water management, and other engineering design applications across the world and these curves are developed based on historical rainfall time series data by fitting a theoretical probability distribution to extreme rainfall series. In recent years, it has been found that extreme precipitation events are increasing due to global climate change. Also, due to population and property concentration in a relatively urban developing area, the flood damage potential in urban areas is high, and the extreme rainfall events are the main cause for urban floods. Therefore, it is important to study the climate change impacts on rainfall IDF curves of a developing urban area. In this study, with the help of 16 global climate (GCMs) simulations, reliability ensemble average (REA) method and Gumbel’s distribution type-I, the impacts of climate change on rainfall IDF curves of study area-Bidkin (DMIC) Aurangabad (MS), India are studied for two future time periods (2016–2057) and (2058–2100), IDF curve is developed for two future time periods. Results of this study indicate that climate change is increasing extreme rainfall events of the study area. Also, it is also observed that the return of period of an extreme rainfall of the study area is reducing and noted that the IDF curve developed by modeling trend in the observed extreme rainfall with covariate is an appropriate choice for designing the study area infrastructure under climate change.