Print Email Facebook Twitter The Influence of Rainfall and Catchment Critical Scales on Urban Hydrological Response Sensitivity Title The Influence of Rainfall and Catchment Critical Scales on Urban Hydrological Response Sensitivity Author Cristiano, E. (TU Delft Water Resources) ten Veldhuis, Marie-claire (TU Delft Water Resources) Wright, Daniel B. (University of Wisconsin-Madison) Smith, James A. (Princeton University) van de Giesen, N.C. (TU Delft Water Resources) Date 2019 Abstract Interactions between spatial and temporal variability of rainfall and catchment characteristics strongly influence hydrological response. In urban areas, where runoff generation is fast due to high imperviousness degree, it is especially relevant to capture the high spatiotemporal rainfall variability. Significant progress has been made in the development of spatially distributed rainfall measurements and of distributed hydrological models, to represent the variability of catchment's characteristics. Interactions between rainfall and basin scales on hydrological response sensitivity, however, needs deeper investigation. A previous study investigated the hydrological response in the small urbanized catchment of Cranbrook (8 km 2 , London, UK) and proposed three dimensionless “scale factors” to identify if the available rainfall resolution is sufficient to properly predict hydrological response. We aim to verify the applicability of these scale factors to larger scales, with a distinct physiographic setting, in Little Sugar Creek (111 km 2 , Charlotte, USA), to identify the required rainfall resolution and to predict model performance. Twenty-eight events were selected from a weather radar data set from the National Weather Radar Network, with a resolution of 1 km 2 and 15 min. Rainfall data were aggregated to coarser resolutions and used as input for a distributed hydrological model. Results show that scale factors and associated thresholds are generally applicable for characterization of urban flood response to rainfall across spatiotemporal scales. Additionally, application of scale factors in observation-based analysis supports identification of event characteristics that are poorly captured and critical improvements that need to be made before the model can benefit from high-resolution rainfall. Subject hydrological response sensitivityrainfall resolutionrainfall variabilityscale factorsurban hydrologyweather radar hydrological applications To reference this document use: http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:1a8956e3-0d5f-4d11-b084-bcfc1b4de13e DOI https://doi.org/10.1029/2018WR024143 ISSN 0043-1397 Source Water Resources Research, 55 (4), 3375-3390 Part of collection Institutional Repository Document type journal article Rights © 2019 E. Cristiano, Marie-claire ten Veldhuis, Daniel B. Wright, James A. Smith, N.C. van de Giesen Files PDF Cristiano_et_al_2019_Wate ... search.pdf 2.99 MB Close viewer /islandora/object/uuid:1a8956e3-0d5f-4d11-b084-bcfc1b4de13e/datastream/OBJ/view