Areal Reduction Factors for Two Eastern United States Regions with High Rain-Gauge Density
Publication: Journal of Hydrologic Engineering
Volume 10, Issue 4
Abstract
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Technical Paper-29, published in the late 1950s, remains the most commonly used reference for estimating extreme areal precipitation from station data in the United States. Although a number of alternative methods have been proposed over the intervening years, a rigorous evaluation of the assumptions used in the compilation of TP-29 has not been presented. Overall, TP-29 areal reduction factors provide a conservative means of relating station precipitation extremes to basin average values. For watershed areas less than , reevaluated areal reduction factors, are in close agreement with the TP-29 values. For larger watersheds, which TP-29 does not address, the areal reduction factors continue to decay exponentially. The areal reduction factors were found to be particularly sensitive to return period and season, with less extreme areal precipitation relative to the corresponding station precipitation at longer return periods and during the warm season. The reevaluated factors exhibit modest differences between study areas in North Carolina and New Jersey. The influence of station density, interpolation method, and topographical rainfall biases appears insignificant.
Get full access to this article
View all available purchase options and get full access to this article.
Acknowledgments
This work was supported by NOAA Grant No. UNSPECIFIEDNA17RJ1222. It represents a portion of the principal author’s M.S. thesis, and thus thanks are extended to Dr. Dan Wilks and Dr. Bill Philpot for their guidance, time, and suggestions as graduate committee members.
References
Asquith, W. H. (1999). “Areal-reduction factors for the precipitation of the 1-day design storm in Texas.” U.S. Geological Survey, Water-Resources Investigations Report 99-4267, Austin, Tex., 81 pp.
Asquith, W. H., and Famiglietti, J. S. (2000). “Precipitation areal-reduction factor estimation using an annual-maxima centered approach.” J. Hydrol., 230, 55–69.
Bell, F. C. (1976). “The areal reduction factor in rainfall frequency estimation.” Natural Environmental Research Council (NERC), Report No. 35, Institute of Hydrology, Wallingford, U.K.
DeGaetano, A. T. (2000). “A serially-complete simulated observation time metadata file for U. S. daily Historical Climatology Network stations.” Bull. Am. Meteorol. Soc., 81, 49–67.
Konrad, C. E. (1996). “Relationships between precipitation event types and topography in the Southern Blue Ridge mountains of the southeastern USA.” Int. J. Climatol., 16, 49–62.
Konrad, C. E. (1997). “Synoptic-scale features associated with warm season heavy rainfall over the interior Southeastern United States.” Weather Forecast., 12, 557–571.
Landin, M. G., and Bosart, L. F. (1985). “Diurnal variability of precipitation in the Northeastern United States.” Mon. Weather Rev., 113, 989–1014.
Leclerc, G., and Schaake, J. C. (1972). “Derivation of hydrologic frequency curves.” Report 142, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Mass., 151 pp.
Natural Environmental Research Council (1975). “Flood Studies Report, Vol. 2.” Institute of Hydrology, Wallingford, U.K.
New Jersey Home Network (NJHN). (2002). ⟨http://climate.rutgers.edu/stateclim⟩
Omolayo, A. S. (1993). “On the transposition of areal reduction factors for rainfall frequency estimation.” J. Hydrol., 145, 191–205.
Prudhomme, C., and Reed, D. W. (1999). “Mapping extreme rainfall in a mountainous region using geostatistical techniques: A case study in Scotland.” Int. J. Climatol., 19, 1337–1356.
Reed, S. M., and Maidment, D. R. (1995). “A GIS procedure for merging NEXRAD precipitation data and digital elevation models to determine rainfall-runoff modeling parameters.” CRWR online report 95-3, ⟨http://civil.ce.utexas.edu/centers/crwr/reports/online.html⟩
Rodriguez-Iturbe, I., and Mejia, J. M. (1974). “On the transformation of point rainfall to areal rainfall.” Water Resour. Res., 10, 729–735.
Scott, C. M., and Shulman, M. D. (1979). “An areal and temporal analysis of precipitation in the Northeastern United States.” J. Appl. Meteorol., 18, 627–633.
Srikanthan, R. A. (1995). “A review of the methods for estimating areal reduction factors for design rainfalls.” Report 95/3, Cooperative Research Centre for Catchment Hydrology, Melbourne, Australia, 36 pp.
Stewart, E. J. (1989). “Areal reduction factors for design storm construction: Joint use of raingauge and radar data.” International Association of Hydrological Sciences Publ., 181, 31–49, available from IAHS, Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, Wallingford, Oxfordshire OX10 8BB, U.K.
U.S. Weather Bureau (1957). Rainfall intensity-frequency regime—Pt. 1, The Ohio Valley, TP-29, U.S. Dept. of Commerce, Washington, D.C., 44 pp.
Wilks, D. S. (1993). “Comparison of three-parameter probability distributions for representing annual extreme and partial duration precipitation series.” Water Resour. Res., 29, 3543–3549.
Wilks, D. S. (1995). Statistical methods in the atmospheric sciences: An introduction, Academic, San Diego, 467 pp.
Information & Authors
Information
Published In
Copyright
© 2005 ASCE.
History
Received: Apr 1, 2004
Accepted: Nov 9, 2004
Published online: Jul 1, 2005
Published in print: Jul 2005
Authors
Metrics & Citations
Metrics
Citations
Download citation
If you have the appropriate software installed, you can download article citation data to the citation manager of your choice. Simply select your manager software from the list below and click Download.