Swiss Rainfall Mass Curves and their Influence on Extreme Flood Simulation

Fränz Zeimetz (), Bettina Schaefli, Guillaume Artigue, Javier García Hernández and Anton J. Schleiss
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Fränz Zeimetz: Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL)
Bettina Schaefli: Université de Lausanne (UNIL), Institute of Earth Surface Dynamics
Guillaume Artigue: Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL)
Javier García Hernández: Centre de recherche sur l’environnement alpin (CREALP)
Anton J. Schleiss: Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL)

Water Resources Management: An International Journal, Published for the European Water Resources Association (EWRA), 2018, vol. 32, issue 8, No 4, 2625-2638

Abstract: Abstract Extreme flood estimates for dam safety are routinely obtained from hydrologic simulations driven by selected design storms. The temporal structure of such design storms can be obtained from Rainfall Mass Curves (RMCs), which are adimensionalized curves of the cumulative precipitation depth as a function of event duration. This paper assesses for the first time the spatialand temporal variability of observed RMCs for Switzerland, an Alpine region with complex topography. The relevance of the detected RMC variability for extreme flood estimation is illustrated based on an application to a high elevation catchment, the Mattmark dam catchment in the Swiss Alps. The obtained results underline that quantile RCMs represent a simple yet powerful tool to construct design storms for dam safety verification and that regional, seasonal and event-duration effects on RMCs are small enough to justify the use of a unique set of Swiss-wide quantile RMCs. The presented analysis could be refined in the future by explicitly accounting for orographic, convective or frontal precipitation events.

Keywords: Rainfall mass curve; Huff curves; extreme floods; Probable Maximum Precipitation; Hydrologic simulation; Design storm; Rainfall-runoff model (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
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DOI: 10.1007/s11269-018-1948-y

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