Uncertainty of Intensity-Duration-Frequency Curves Due to Adoption or Otherwise of the Temperature Climate Variable in Rainfall Disaggregation

Most areas around the world lack fine rainfall records which are needed to derive Intensity-Duration-Frequency (IDF) curves, and those that are available are in the form of daily data. Thus, the disaggregation of rainfall data from coarse to fine temporal resolution may offer a solution to that problem. Most of the previous studies have adopted only historical rainfall data as the predictor to disaggregate daily rainfall data to hourly resolution, while only a few studies have adopted other historical climate variables besides rainfall for such a purpose. Therefore, this study adopts and assesses the performance of two methods of rainfall disaggregation one uses for historical temperature and rainfall variables while the other uses only historical rainfall data for disaggregation. The two methods are applied to disaggregate the current observed and projected modeled daily rainfall data to an hourly scale for a small urban area in the United Kingdom. Then, the IDF curves for the current and future climates are derived for each case of disaggregation and compared. After which, the uncertainties associated with the difference between the two cases are assessed. The constructed IDF curves (for the two cases of disaggregation) agree in the sense that they both show that there is a big difference between the current and future climates for all durations and frequencies. However, the uncertainty related to the difference between the results of the constructed IDF curves (for the two cases of disaggregation) for each climate is considerable, especially for short durations and long return periods. In addition, the projected and current rainfall values based on disaggregation case which adopts historical temperature and rainfall variables were higher than the corresponding projections and current values based on only rainfall data for the disaggregation.