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Lookup NU author(s): Dr Roberto Villalobos Herrera, Dr Stephen Blenkinsop, Dr Selma GuerreiroORCiD, Professor Hayley Fowler
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).
© 2023 The Authors. Journal of Flood Risk Management published by Chartered Institution of Water and Environmental Management and John Wiley & Sons Ltd. The Flood Studies Report (FSR) summer and winter design profiles are a key component of rainfall design guidance in the United Kingdom (UK). We have examined the rainfall profiles of over 70,000 extreme rainfall events with the original FSR profile methodology. This analysis reveals that rainfall profiles change with rainstorm duration but not season, contradicting one of the key assumptions in current UK rainfall design guidance. By using a method that does not artificially generate symmetrical and centred profiles we show that profile shapes are highly variable and strongly related to event duration and magnitude. Short events tend towards front-loaded profiles, while heavy long-duration events tend towards centred profile shapes. Finally, manual, automatic and mixed methods of deriving new design profiles for use in the UK were trialled, with consistent results. These could be used to derive new design profiles to supersede the FSR profiles. Notably, peak intensities in observed profiles and trialled summary profiles often exceeded those found in both FSR profiles. We conclude that current design profile guidance for the UK fails to account for the observed variability in event profile shapes and peak intensities and may lead to significant under- or over-design of flood risk management solutions.
Author(s): Villalobos Herrera R, Blenkinsop S, Guerreiro SB, Dale M, Faulkner D, Fowler HJ
Publication type: Article
Publication status: Published
Journal: Journal of Flood Risk Management
Year: 2024
Volume: 176
Issue: 1
Print publication date: 01/03/2024
Online publication date: 25/10/2023
Acceptance date: 03/10/2023
Date deposited: 08/11/2023
ISSN (print): 1460-3799
ISSN (electronic): 1753-318X
Publisher: John Wiley and Sons Inc.
URL: https://doi.org/10.1111/jfr3.12958
DOI: 10.1111/jfr3.12958
Data Access Statement: The original data are in the public domain and available for download from the providers instructions to download EA data can be found at https://environment.data.gov.uk/flood-monitoring/doc/rainfall, instructions to download NRW data can be found at https://api-portal.naturalresources.wales/docs/services/open-data-river-level-rainfall-and-sea-data-api/operations/historicaldataforstationparameter, and instructions to download SEPA data can be found at https://www2.sepa.org.uk/rainfall. QC associated scripts are available at https://github.com/nclwater/intense-qc and https://github.com/nclwater/SubHourlyQC.
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