HR: 0800h
AN: SF31A-0718    [Abstracts]
TI: A comparison of three alternatives for generation of continuous rainfall data at point locations
AU: * Sivakumar, B
EM: sbellie@ucdavis.edu
AF: Department of Land, Air and Water Resources, University of California, Davis, CA 95616 United States
AU: Sharma, A
EM: a.sharma@unsw.edu.au
AF: School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, The University of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW 2052 Australia
AB: The availability of high resolution rainfall data is becoming an important issue in the design and management of small (mostly urban) water resources systems. These sequences serve as inputs for a range of applications that include continuous flow simulation, rain water tank design, and the evaluation of alternate policies for assessment of environmental impacts in small catchment areas. This study compares three alternatives for generating sequences of high resolution point rainfall. These alternatives are: (a) A nonparametric approach which aims to re-use fractions of continuous rainfall with respect to their respective daily totals as the basis of disaggregating generated daily values to a continuous time scale, (b) A parametric alternative that generates continuous rainfall under the assumption of an alternating renewal process, and disaggregates it to a finer time step using a dimensionless mass curve, (c) A cascade based parametric procedure that uses the self scaling rationale to disaggregate daily rainfall to a finer time scale. These alternatives are compared based on their ability to generate extremes at various scales of aggregation, apart from a comparison of some of the basic statistical attributes of interest from the point of using these sequences for continuous flow simulation. Comparisons are based on the use of 88 and 129 years of continuous rainfall data from Sydney and Melbourne, Australia, respectively.
DE: 1854 Precipitation (3354)
DE: 1869 Stochastic processes
SC: Special Focus: Advances in Data Acquisition, Management, Analysis and Display [SF]
MN: 2004 AGU Fall Meeting