Estimation of sub-hourly DDF curves using scaling properties of hourly and sub-hourly data at partially gauged site

In urban drainage systems, knowledge of short-duration rainfall events can be considered as one of the most critical elements when their hydrological behaviour wants to be investigated. The temporal resolution of rainfall data usually available for practical applications is often lower than the data requested for the design procedures or mathematical models application, greatly affecting their reliability. Moreover, when high resolution rain gauges are available in the catchment, the registration period cannot be sufficiently long for obtaining practically usable statistical analyses. The present study proposes a method for estimating the distribution of sub-hourly extreme rainfalls at sites where data for time interval of interest do not exist, but rainfall data for longer duration are available. The proposed method is based on the “scale-invariance” (or “scaling”) theory whose concepts imply that statistical properties of the extreme rainfall processes for different temporal scales are self-related by a scale-changing operator involving only the scale ratio. The methodology is applied to extreme rainfall data from a rain gauge network within the metropolitan area of Palermo (Italy). Following the application, it is shown that the statistical properties of the rainfall series have a simple scaling property over the range of duration 10 min–24 h. A simple parsimonious analytical formulation for the DDF curves, which embodies the scaling behaviour, is presented.