Abstract
Abstract. Temporal properties of 152 575 rainfall events, recorded at time steps of 5 min, having different durations and occurring between 1989 and 2008 at 155 localities of Calabria (Italy), have been analysed in this paper. Samples from 45 533 storms have been selected to classify rainfall events as "significant" with regard to their contribution to soil erosion, flooding and/or other geo-hydrological processes. The samples are representative of a wide variety of situations in terms of duration, total rainfall, intensity, etc. The use of standardized rainfall profiles (SRP) is proposed to describe the within-storm temporal pattern. The main attraction of this method lies in the fact that it is based on actual data of regional precipitation. Its weak point is that large samples of data are required to obtain regional profiles. The research necessities for improving the use of Huff curves for storm disaggregation and its the potential use are summarized in this paper on the basis of the specific literature. A new criterion – based on the comparison of the areas A1, A2, A3 and A4 that underlie the four 25% of durations of a given SRP, and the corresponding four values of the "uniform" SRP (USRP), is suggested here with the aim of improving the use of the information content of SRP. Some interesting results concerning the sample frequency and the characterization of parameters for hydrological applications are commented on. The study conducted so far has produced important, albeit preliminary, results for different contexts of Calabria concerning the use of SRP among the methods for constructing design storm hyetographs.
Highlights
Many hydrological models require the rainfall pattern in the spatial-temporal domain as an input
Almost all ErREv pertaining to the first quartile fall in the BSC 1111 and 1110; ErREv pertaining to the 4th quartile are distributed in BSC 0000 but, in a significant proportion, in BSC 1110 – which means that these ErREv are characterized by a delayed peak, despite the amounts of accumulated rainfall in the other three quartiles are greater than those of uniform SRP (USRP)
With respect to the rain events analyzed in previous studies, which are only a few hundred, those considered in this investigation are many thousands, and they are characterized by a very detailed time step
Summary
Many hydrological models require the rainfall pattern in the spatial-temporal domain as an input. Models often try to reproduce the spatial and temporal distribution of available observations, but calibration is often unsatisfactory because of the high variability of rainfall intensity with time, as observed for several rain events (Kottegoda and Kassim, 1991). The analysis of the SRP can be performed to disaggregate the precipitation totals or to derive other types of information. To this purpose, the rainfall events can be classified according to various criteria: duration, total rainfall, maximum intensity in a fixed time or average intensity, geographical area of occurrence, etc. According to Wischmeier and Smith (1978), samples of 45 533 storms were selected to classify rainfall events as “significant” with regard to their contribution to soil erosion, flooding and/or other geo-hydrological processes. Results concerning the sample frequency and the characterization of parameters for hydrological applications are dis-3 cussed in the following
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