Regionalization of Rainfall Intensity-Duration-Frequency using a Simple Scaling Model

Abstract

Design storm is one of the most important tools to design hydraulic structures, hydrologic system and watershed management, mostly extracted by intensity- duration - frequency (IDF) curves for a given specific duration and return period. As for conventional methods to calculate IDF curves, the precipitation should be recorded for different durations so that foregoing curves can be extracted. Such data can be collected from rain gauge stations. In many areas, just daily precipitation data are available by which IDF curves cannot be extracted as per conventional methods. The aim of this research is to make IDF curves for short-term durations according to time scaling model as well as daily rainfalls. The relationships of this method are characterized with three variables including mean (μ 24) and standard deviation (σ 24) of daily rainfall intensity, and scaling exponent (H) by which all IDF curves might be drawn. The method used in present paper entails for less computational steps than conventional methods and by far has low parameters considerably than others in turn increases reliability. Scaling method is used to extract the IDF curves in rain-gauge stations in Khuzestan province located in southwest Iran and results proved the efficiency and robustness of the scaling method. Also ability of scaling concept method was examined in constructing of regional IDF.