Abstract
Several approximations are used in deriving the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Atlas 14 depth-duration-frequency (DDF) functions from annual maximum series (AMS) of rainfall amounts over various durations. Analyses reported in this paper show that the return periods in Atlas 14 DDF functions for Florida are likely overestimated at about 10% of the base stations for durations of 15 min, 1 h, and 24 h. This relatively high incidence of return-period overestimation is also evidenced by measurements at several stations having very high Atlas 14-estimated return periods. Comparison of the Atlas 14 generalized extreme value (GEV) distributions of rainfall with sample distributions derived from AMS data show agreement at only 68%, 64%, and 30% of all base stations for durations of 15 min, 1 h, and 24 h, respectively. It is concluded that the expected rainfall amounts for given durations are not always reliable over the Atlas 14 range of return periods.
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Data Availability Statement
Some or all data, models, or code used during the study were provided by a third party. The Atlas 14 dataare provided by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and can be found online at https://hdsc.nws.noaa.gov/hdsc/pfds/.
References
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Information & Authors
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Published In
Journal of Hydrologic Engineering
Volume 28 • Issue 3 • March 2023
Copyright
© 2022 American Society of Civil Engineers.
History
Received: Jul 26, 2022
Accepted: Oct 26, 2022
Published online: Dec 16, 2022
Published in print: Mar 1, 2023
Discussion open until: May 16, 2023
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