Evan Hajani and Ataur Rahman and Khaled Haddad
Trend Analysis for Extreme Rainfall Events in New South Wales, Australia
834 - 839
2014
8
12
International Journal of Environmental and Ecological Engineering
https://publications.waset.org/pdf/9999886
https://publications.waset.org/vol/96
World Academy of Science, Engineering and Technology
Climate change will affect the hydrological cycle in
many different ways such as increase in evaporation and rainfalls.
There have been growing interests among researchers to identify the
nature of trends in historical rainfall data in many different parts of
the world. This paper examines the trends in annual maximum
rainfall data from 30 stations in New South Wales, Australia by using
two nonparametric tests, MannKendall (MK) and Spearman’s Rho
(SR). Rainfall data were analyzed for fifteen different durations
ranging from 6 min to 3 days. It is found that the subhourly
durations (6, 12, 18, 24, 30 and 48 minutes) show statistically
significant positive (upward) trends whereas longer duration (subdaily
and daily) events generally show a statistically significant
negative (downward) trend. It is also found that the MK test and SR
test provide notably different results for some rainfall event durations
considered in this study. Since shorter duration subhourly rainfall
events show positive trends at many stations, the design rainfall data
based on stationary frequency analysis for these durations need to be
adjusted to account for the impact of climate change. These shorter
durations are more relevant to many urban development projects
based on smaller catchments having a much shorter response time.
Open Science Index 96, 2014