Development of Rainfall Intensity, Duration and Frequency Relationship on a Daily and Sub-Daily Basis (Case Study: Yalamlam Area, Saudi Arabia)

Abstract

Realistic runoff estimates are crucial for the accurate design of stormwater drainage systems, particularly in developing urban catchments which are prone to overland flow and street inundation following extreme rainstorms. This paper derives new intensity–duration–frequency (IDF) curves for the Yalamlam area in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. These curves were obtained based on daily rainfall measurements and, in some short durations, across the entire study area over 30 years. The study is based on applying two distributions—the Log-Pearson type III and Gumbel—to estimate the average rainfall for the different return periods. The results show that there are slight differences between the Log-Pearson type III distribution and the Gumbel distribution, so the average parameters were used to construct the IDF curve in the Yalamlam area. The maximum daily rainfall was converted into sub-daily intervals using two methods and compared with the observed value. The new ratios were calculated using the converting rainfall from daily to sub-daily. These ratios are recommended for application in the Yalamlam area if there are no short-time-interval data available. The following ratios for 1-day rainfall were proposed: 0.37, 0.40, 0.46, 0.53, 0.61, 0.66, 0.70, 0.76, 0.80, and 0.87 for 10 min, 15 min, 30 min, 1 h, 2 h, 3 h, 4 h, 6 h, 8 h, and 12 h rainfall, respectively. The developed IDF curve for the Yalamlam district was built based on the daily and sub-daily observed data.