Data analysis of rainfall event characteristics and derivation of flood frequency distribution equations for urban stormwater management purposes

Abstract

Urban stormwater management aims at mitigating the adverse impacts of urbanization. Hydrological models are used in support of stormwater management planning and design. There are three main approaches that can be applied for this modeling purpose: (1) continuous simulation approach which is accurate but time-consuming; (2) design storm approach, which is widely used and its accuracy highly depends on the selected antecedent moisture conditions and temporal distribution of design storms; and (3) the analytical probabilistic approach which is recently developed and still not used in practice. Although it is time-effective and it can produce results as accurate as the other two approaches; the analytical probabilistic approach requires further developments in order to make it more reliable and accurate. For this purpose, three subtopics are investigated in this thesis. (1) Rainfall data analysis as required by the analytical probabilistic approach with emphasis on testing the exponentiality of rainfall event duration, volume and interevent time (i.e., time separating it from its preceding rainfall event). A goodness-of-fit testing procedure that is suitable for this kind of data analysis was proposed. (2) Derivation of new analytical probabilistic models for peak discharge rate incorporating trapezoidal and triangular hydrograph shapes in order to include all possible catchment’s responses. And (3) the infiltration process is assumed to continue until the end of the rainfall event; however, the soil may get saturated earlier and the excess amount would contribute to the runoff volume which may have adverse impact if not taken into consideration. Thus, in addition to the infiltration process, the saturation excess runoff is also included and new models for flood frequencies are developed. All the models developed in this thesis are tested and compared to methods used in practice, reasonable results were obtained.