Climate change impacts on intensity duration frequency curves of precipitation: A case study of Shiraz synoptic station, Iran

Abstract

Intensity-duration-frequency (IDF) curves are among the standard design tools for many engineering applications such as urban drainage management. Since climate change may considerably affect precipitation, updating of IDF curves is highly necessary. The present study aims to examine the impacts of climate change on IDF curves of Shiraz synoptic station using downscaled outputs of Hadcm3 AOGCM under various emission scenarios (A1B, A2,B1) applying larswg-5 model for the period of 2046 to 2065. The fitted Gumbel distribution was used to estimate the maximum short-term precipitation quantiles in the base period (1968-2000) and the verified empirical Bell type equation was used for the future period. The results show that the mean of maximum daily precipitation and annual precipitation will decrease in the future. Also, the maximum precipitation intensities up to 60 min duration will reduce from 0.15 mm hr-1 to about 10.79 mm hr-1 compared to the observed period in all returns periods and various scenarios. Overall, there were no tangible changes in intensities for durations higher than 60 min. The highest reduction in precipitation intensity would be at the 20 min duration with 100-year return period in the A2 scenario.

Keywords

• Climate change
• IDF,
• Lars wg-5
• Hadcm3