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Swiss Rainfall Mass Curves and their Influence on Extreme Flood Simulation

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Abstract

Extreme flood estimates for dam safety are routinely obtained from hydrologic simulations driven by selected design storms. The temporal structure of such design storms can be obtained from Rainfall Mass Curves (RMCs), which are adimensionalized curves of the cumulative precipitation depth as a function of event duration. This paper assesses for the first time the spatialand temporal variability of observed RMCs for Switzerland, an Alpine region with complex topography. The relevance of the detected RMC variability for extreme flood estimation is illustrated based on an application to a high elevation catchment, the Mattmark dam catchment in the Swiss Alps. The obtained results underline that quantile RCMs represent a simple yet powerful tool to construct design storms for dam safety verification and that regional, seasonal and event-duration effects on RMCs are small enough to justify the use of a unique set of Swiss-wide quantile RMCs. The presented analysis could be refined in the future by explicitly accounting for orographic, convective or frontal precipitation events.

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Acknowledgements

This work was funded by the Swiss Federal Office of Energy (SFOE). The work of B. Schaefli was supported by the the Swiss Competence Center on Energy Research-Supply of Energy, and by the Swiss National Science Foundation, grant number PP00P2_157611. Precipitation data has been provided by MeteoSwiss. The authors also thank the engineering company e-dric.ch for their hydrological modeling software and the engineering company Hertig & Lador SA for the PMP data (elaborated for the SFOE). The Swiss PMP values should become freely available in the near future. The data corresponding to the identified Swiss-wide reference quantile RMCs is available in the Supplementary Material.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Lausanne, Switzerland

    Fränz Zeimetz, Guillaume Artigue & Anton J. Schleiss

  2. Faculty of Geosciences and Environment, Université de Lausanne (UNIL), Institute of Earth Surface Dynamics, Lausanne, Switzerland

    Bettina Schaefli

  3. Centre de recherche sur l’environnement alpin (CREALP), Sion, Switzerland

    Javier García Hernández

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  1. Fränz Zeimetz
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  2. Bettina Schaefli
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  3. Guillaume Artigue
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  4. Javier García Hernández
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  5. Anton J. Schleiss
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Correspondence to Fränz Zeimetz.

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Zeimetz, F., Schaefli, B., Artigue, G. et al. Swiss Rainfall Mass Curves and their Influence on Extreme Flood Simulation. Water Resour Manage 32, 2625–2638 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11269-018-1948-y

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