Annual Maxima of Station-based Rainfall Data over Different Accumulation Durations

Description

These data were used in the study "Flexible and Consistent Quantile Estimation for Intensity-Duration-Frequency Curves" (Fauer et al., 2021). Rainfall data were collected from stations by the German Meteorological Service (DWD) and Wupperverband (corrected data). Raw time series data from the German Meteorological Service is publicly available under https://opendata.dwd.de/climate_environment/CDC/observations_germany/climate/. Only the annual precipitation maxima over different durations are published here.

Files

yearMax.csv: This file contains aggregated rainfall data over different durations and for different stations.

meta.csv: This file contains additional information of the different stations such as longitude, latitude, altitude, temporal resolution (m=minutely, h=hourly, d=daily), group. The same group is assigned to stations which have a distance of less than 250 meters and can be treated as one station.

Abstract of the according study

We suggest a flexible parametric model for describing intensity duration frequency relationships (IDF-curves) in a consistent way, i.e., without crossing of different quantiles for a wide range of durations (1 min to 5 days). The model is based on the duration-dependent formulation of the generalized extreme value distribution (GEV). The original model shows a power-law like behaviour for the quantiles for a wide range of durations and takes care of a deviation from this scaling relation (curvature) for small durations. We extend the model with two features: i) different power-law exponents for different quantiles (multiscaling) and ii) deviation from the power-law for large durations (flattening). Based on the quantile skill score, we investigate the performance of the resulting flexible model with respect to the benefit of the individual features (curvature, multiscaling, flattening) with simulated and empirical data. We provide detailed information on the duration and probability ranges for which specific features or a systematic combination of features leads to improvements for stations in a case study area in the Wupper catchment (Germany). Our results show that allowing curvature or multiscaling improves the model only for very short or long durations, respectively, but leads to disadvantages in modeling the other duration ranges. In contrast, allowing flattening on average leads to an improvement for medium durations between 1 hour and 1 day without affecting other duration regimes. Overall, the new parametric form offers a flexible and performant model for consistently describing IDF relations over a wide range of durations.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the German Weather Service (DWD), and the Wupperverband, especially Marc Scheibel, for maintaining the station-based rainfall gauge and providing us with data.