The Effect of Nonstationarity in Rainfall on Urban Flooding Based on Coupling SWMM and MIKE21

Abstract

The characteristics of urban pluvial flooding are altering all over the world due to environmental change. In this paper, generalized additive models for location, scale and shape (GAMLSS) was employed to analyze nonstationary frequency of extreme precipitation at subdaily scale. Nonstationary precipitation return periods were estimated using the expected waiting time (EWT) interpretation. A model coupling SWMM and MIKE21 was established, and calibrated and verified by three historical urban floods. Then, it was utilized to simulate urban floods under stationary and nonstationary rainfall conditions with different return periods. The simulated results illustrated that rainfall depth under nonstationarity was greater than that of stationarity when return period was less than 10 years, but the results reversed when the return period was over 20 years. The main variation of rainfall depth occurred within 6 h. The deviation of the maximum water depth was less than 10% for five return levels, and the difference in the longest inundation lengths was 1.2 h for 50-year return period under two assumptions. It may indicate that slight differences of urban flooding were detected between stationary and nonstationary conditions in the study region, which suggested a further study about urban flood under nonstationarity.