| Abstract: | Abstract For urban drainage and urban flood modelling applications, fine spatial and temporal rainfall resolution is required. Simulation methods are developed to overcome the problem of data limitations. Although temporal resolution higher than 10–20 minutes is not well suited for detailed rainfall—runoff modelling for urban drainage networks, in the absence of monitored data, longer time intervals can be used for master planning or similar purposes. A methodology is presented for temporal disaggregation and spatial distribution of hourly rainfall fields, tested on observations for a 10-year period at 16 raingauges in the urban catchment of Dalmuir (UK). Daily rainfall time series are simulated with a generalized linear model (GLM). Next, using a single-site disaggregation model, the daily data of the central gauge in the catchment are downscaled to an hourly time scale. This hourly pattern is then applied linearly in space to disaggregate the daily data into hourly rainfall at all sites. Finally, the spatial rainfall field is obtained using inverse distance weighting (IDW) to interpolate the data over the whole catchment. Results are satisfactory: at individual sites within the region the simulated data preserve properties that match the observed statistics to an acceptable level for practical purposes. |
