Compilation method of a catalogue of reasonable worst-case rainfall series for flash flood simulations of short, convective rainstorms

•A categorisation method for detection of worst-case rain storms was derived.•A catalogue of 24 catastrophic rain series with 1-min resolution was presented.•Hydrodynamic simulations ranked the storms for different hazard attributes.•Hyetograph shape played an important role to understand flashiness of floods. In this study, a categorisation method was developed and applied to identify, select and rank reasonable worst-case rainfall storm events with time-series resolution of one minute and duration of up to one hour. The method yields a catalogue of 24 reasonable worst-case rainfall series, i.e. potentially catastrophic events that could be used for safe-to-fail flash flood model scenarios, thus encouraging the testing of critical infrastructure and pedestrian safety for people trapped in floods. The identified 24 events were shown to be considerably more extreme than corresponding design storms, with a return interval of 100 years. In the selection of the extremes, special care was taken to consider different hazard attributes, which are associated with intrinsically different observed hyetograph shapes, including rectangular, short and long triangle, and double peak shape categories. Hydrodynamic simulations were carried out using the 2D robust shallow water model hms++ to quantify the flooding impact of the 24 rainfall scenarios in a small urbanised catchment, which enabled the ranking of the scenarios based on different hazard attributes. Overall, the rectangular and long-triangle events showed the highest total discharge, and the rectangular events comprise both the longest duration for hazard velocity and deep flooding. The long-triangle events presented the highest peak discharge and peak water depths. The short-triangle ones showed the highest flashiness (shortest time to peak), whereas the double peak events yielded the longest time to peak. The ranking emphasised the importance of the hyetograph shape characteristics of extreme storms and which needs to be taken into account in flash flood management. The novel categorisation method is easily transferable to other regions, if high-resolution rain series are available.