Author(s): H. Leonardo Cisneros-Iturbe; Ildiko J. Pelczer; Ramon Dominguez-Mora
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Keywords: Catchment; Detention basin; Mexico City; Rainfall depth; Return period; Urban drainage
Abstract: A revision of the use, for design and operational purposes, of daily rainfall return period in neighboring catchments was carried out. The verification leans on a procedure that allows to obtain the rainfall depth and its associated return period in a catchment from the rainfall depth of another. The procedure is based on linear regressions between catchments’ rainfall and on adjustments of the Gumbel probability distribution function to observed annual maximum daily rainfall data in the catchments. The precipitation data used in the study corresponds to the wet season (May to November) of 17 years of Mexico City’s raingauge network measurements. Thiessen polygons of the stations were employed in order to compute the rainfall depths in the catchments. The analyses showed that for close catchments, there is a significant correlation between the observed rainfall depths and their return periods are similar. The catchments were grouped by a drainage functioning criteria and one of them was selected in each group to generate the rainfall on the others. The applicability of the procedure was verified by the comparison of the water volume obtained with the algorithm to the water volume corresponding to the rainfall of an overall 50 years return period. The above test and the final verification to actual data confirm the good performance of the procedure.
Year: 2007