Case Study of Applying Multifractal Models for Rainfall IDF Analysis in China
Publication: Journal of Hydrologic Engineering
Volume 19, Issue 1
Abstract
Rainfall intensity-duration-frequency (IDF) curves are one of the most commonly used tools in water resources engineering. Two multifractal rainfall models with multifractal behavior are used to estimate IDF curves in this paper. The models are composed of exterior and interior processes with constant duration and “bare” intensity . Using high resolution data of rainfall, previous research concluded that the results of the IDF curves tend to be insensitive to the length of data record. In this paper, six years of rainfall data at a 5-min resolution at two stations (Nan Xiong and Ai Zi), Guangdong province, China, are analyzed with the multifractal models to estimate IDF curves. Compared with the traditional parametric models for determining IDF curves, the multifractal approach reduces the amount of parameters required to be calculated, and six years of high resolution rainfall data are sufficient to estimate the IDF curves. Forty-six years of annual maxima rainfall data for different durations at the Nan Xiong stations and 35 years at the Ai Zi station are fitted to the Pearson-3 distribution to obtain the IDF curves. The results of the two multifractal models are similar to those from the traditional parametric model for low return periods . This study has significant practical importance in China for regions lacking long records of rainfall data.
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Published In
Journal of Hydrologic Engineering
Volume 19 • Issue 1 • January 2014
Pages: 205 - 210
Copyright
© 2014 American Society of Civil Engineers.
History
Received: Oct 27, 2011
Accepted: Jan 5, 2013
Published online: Jan 9, 2013
Discussion open until: Jun 9, 2013
Published in print: Jan 1, 2014
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