Book Description

The principal objective of this study is to provide simple analytical methods for recovering the frequency distributions of any short-term rainfall. The required data are the total rainfall for a given period of time and the actual duration of the rain in days, hours, or minutes for estimating daily, hourly, or instantaneous rainfall, respectively. Average annual hourly rainfall may be estimated at times as a function of mean annual temperature. Instantaneous rainfall is limited in this study to one-hour storms or rainy periods within storms. Two rainfall models are provided. The first, the general model, is based mainly on a particular skew distribution that was found previously to represent rainfall under very diverse conditions. This model recovers a considerable range of information for almost any rainfall occurrence. The second, or explicit, model is specific for a given average rain rate. The latter model may be utilized for situations not covered by the general model or as an alternate method. In contrast to certain of the earlier techniques, the above models (a) depend on viable rainfall mass distribution for the situation at hand and (b) determine short-term rainfall, first with respect to the percent frequency of the total duration of the rain and with respect to real time. The results yield reasonably accurate short-term rain rates for nearly 98 percent of the rain period. Keywords: Computer programs, Computer program listings, BASIC programming language.