Disaggregation of fixed time interval rainfall to continuous measured rainfall for the purpose of design rainfall estimation

Design rainfall estimates are primarily used in single-event deterministic design flood estimation methods where estimates of the peak discharge are based on the critical storm duration or time of concentration (TC) of a catchment. Therefore, daily design rainfall depths used in flood estimations must either be decreased or increased from durations less than or longer than 24 hours to the design rainfall depths for a rainfall duration of TC. This paper presents the comparison of two South African methods used to convert or scale 1-day fixed time interval observed rainfall (08:00 to 08:00) to continuous measures of n-hour rainfall for selected TC durations at a quaternary catchment level, in the C5 secondary drainage region in South Africa as pilot case study. In each quaternary catchment, the annual maximum series (AMS) of the 1-day fixed time interval point rainfall were extracted, infilled, converted and scaled to appropriate continuous measures of TC-hour point rainfall using conversion factors (Adamson, 1981) and scaling factors (Smithers and Schulze, 2003), respectively. Thereafter, all the TC-hour observed point rainfall values were averaged to observed catchment rainfall at a quaternary catchment level using the Thiessen polygon method. In using the two methods to estimate continuous short-duration n-hour (TC ≤ 24 hours) and long-duration n-hour (TC > 24 hours) catchment rainfall from 1-day fixed time interval point rainfall, an acceptable (0.71