Abstract
Design rainfall intensity–frequency–duration data are a basic input to many water-related development projects. To derive design rainfalls, one needs long period of recorded rainfall data. Although daily rainfall data are generally widely available, short-duration rainfall data are scarce. For many urban applications, design rainfalls for much shorter durations are needed, which cannot be obtained directly from daily read rainfall data. This paper presents a simple approach that can be adopted to derive design rainfalls of short durations using daily rainfall data and other physio-climatic characteristics using a novel ‘index frequency combined with parameter regression technique’. This uses L moments to reduce the impacts of sampling variability in the analysis. Furthermore, this adopts generalised least squares regression to account for the inter-station correlation of the rainfall data in the analysis. The proposed method is applied to a pilot data set consisting of 203 rainfall stations across Australia. An independent Monte Carlo cross-validation test shows that the proposed method is capable of generating consistent and accurate design rainfall estimates from 6-min to 12-h duration. The developed technique can be adapted to other countries where there is a scarcity of short-duration rainfall data, but daily rainfall data are abundant.
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Acknowledgments
We would like to thank Australian Bureau of Meteorology (BOM), Federal Department of Climate Change in Australia and Engineers Australia for providing financial support to the Project, BOM for providing necessary data for the study, Ms. Janice Green, BOM and Mr. Erwin Weinmann from Monash University for providing suggestions/comments on the work and Mr. Tarik Ahmed for assisting in data compilation.
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Haddad, K., Rahman, A. Derivation of short-duration design rainfalls using daily rainfall statistics. Nat Hazards 74, 1391–1401 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11069-014-1248-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11069-014-1248-7