Generic Method for Merging Satellite and Historical Ground Station Data to Design Rainfall Intensity Duration Frequency (IDF) Curves in Recordless Sub-Saharian Countries

Abstract

The availability of long-term rainfall records is essential to conduct a serious frequency analysis in order to estimate the effective precipitation depth. The development of the process of elaboration of IDF (Intensity-Duration-Frequency) curves for a given location requires very precise data, at least with daily frequency, obtained through the use of rainfall records. The present study presents a method used to merge historical precipitation data with the latest data collected by satellite in order to perform graphs with IDF curves in places where rainfall records are scarce. The homogeneity of the data used is analyzed in order to guarantee its statistical utility and the frequency analysis was performed with the statistical distributions of Extreme Values Type I (Gumbel), Gamma, Pearson Type III and finally with Log-Pearson Type III, in order to verify which one of them applies better to the sites chosen for this analysis: the cities of Benguela and Lobito in the south of Angola. Daily rainfall data from the TRMM mission and historical daily data were used to derive the relationships between the maximum daily precipitation and the sub-daily precipitation values. From the observed daily data, techniques of disaggregation of the collected data were used, in order to generate a synthetic precipitation sequence with the extreme values in periods of time inferior to the daily one, with statistical properties similar to the registered data. Then IDF equations are established, with which the occasional storm depth is calculated for various return periods and various durations and, after them, the IDF curves are drawn for these two geographic stations.