Updated Canonical Rainfall Distributions in the United States
Publication: Journal of Irrigation and Drainage Engineering
Volume 146, Issue 12
Abstract
Previous research has identified five canonical rainfall distributions in the United States; however, identification of these rainfall distributions did not include any rainfall data in the state of Texas. In this study, data from 813 rainfall stations in Texas are used to update the canonical distributions, which are then extended to include Texas. Canonical rainfall distributions are extracted using cluster analysis, which identifies distinct rainfall distributions that are not statistically different from measured rainfall distributions. Novel findings of this study are that the canonical intensity-duration functions for all canonical rainfall clusters in the United States can be expressed in a single functional form, and the canonical rainfall distributions and canonical intensity-duration functions are not very sensitive to return periods in the range of , with the effect of the return period being mostly accounted for in the specification of the rainfall amount.
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Data Availability Statement
Some or all data, models, or code used during the study were provided by a third party (NOAA).
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Information & Authors
Information
Published In
Journal of Irrigation and Drainage Engineering
Volume 146 • Issue 12 • December 2020
Copyright
© 2020 American Society of Civil Engineers.
History
Received: May 16, 2020
Accepted: Aug 6, 2020
Published online: Oct 8, 2020
Published in print: Dec 1, 2020
Discussion open until: Mar 8, 2021
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