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Comparison of Future Design Rainfall with Current Design Rainfall: A Case Study in New South Wales, Australia

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posted on 2024-08-20, 05:12 authored by Iqbal Hossain, Monzur Imteaz, Shirley Gato-Trinidad, Abdullah YilmazAbdullah Yilmaz
Climate change impacts have the potential to alter the design rainfall estimates around the world. Decreasing trends in the summer and winter rainfall in New South Wales (NSW), Australia have already been observed due to climate variability and change. The derivation of design rainfall from historical rainfall, which is required for the design of stormwater management infrastructure, may be ineffective and costly. It is essential to consider climate change impacts in estimating design rainfall for the successful design of stormwater management infrastructure. In this study, the probability of the occurrence of daily extreme rainfall has been assessed under climate change conditions. The assessment was performed using data from 29 meteorological stations in NSW, Australia. For the evaluation of future design rainfall, the probability of the occurrence of extreme rainfall for different recurrence intervals was developed from daily extreme rainfall for the periods of 2020 to 2099 and compared with the current Australian Bureau of Meteorology (BoM) design rainfall estimates. The historical mean extreme rainfall across NSW varied from 37.71 mm to 147.3 mm, indicating the topographic and climatic influences on extreme rainfall. The outcomes of the study suggested that the future design rainfall will be significantly different from the current BoM estimates for most of the studied stations. The comparison of the results showed that future rainfall in NSW will change from −4.7% to +60% for a 100-year recurrence interval. However, for a 2-year recurrence interval, the potential design rainfall change varies from an approximately 8% increase to a 40% decrease. This study revealed that the currently designed stormwater management infrastructure will be idle in the changing climate.

History

Publication Date

2024-06-21

Journal

Atmosphere

Volume

15

Issue

7

Article Number

739

Pagination

16p.

Publisher

Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute

ISSN

2073-4433

Rights Statement

© 2024 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

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