Spatial and temporal variability of rainfall and their effects on hydrological response in urban areas – a review

Cristiano, Elena; ten Veldhuis, Marie-Claire; van de Giesen, Nick

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-21-3859-2017

Articles | Volume 21, issue 7

https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-21-3859-2017

© Author(s) 2017. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

Special issue:

Rainfall and urban hydrology

https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-21-3859-2017

© Author(s) 2017. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

Articles | Volume 21, issue 7

Review article

|

28 Jul 2017

Review article |

| 28 Jul 2017

Spatial and temporal variability of rainfall and their effects on hydrological response in urban areas – a review

Elena Cristiano, Marie-Claire ten Veldhuis, and Nick van de Giesen

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Final revised paper (published on 28 Jul 2017)
Preprint (discussion started on 17 Oct 2016)

Interactive discussion

Status: closed

AC: Author comment | RC: Referee comment | SC: Short comment | EC: Editor comment

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- Supplement

RC1: 'Review', Anonymous Referee #1, 05 Nov 2016
- AC1: 'Reply to reviewer, Anonymous Referee #1, 13 Dec 2016', Elena Cristiano, 13 Dec 2016
RC2: 'Review comments', Anonymous Referee #2, 21 Jan 2017
- AC2: 'Reply to reviewer, "Anonymous Referee" #2, 29 Jan 2017', Elena Cristiano, 29 Jan 2017
EC1: 'Editor Comment', Peter Molnar, 22 Feb 2017

Peer-review completion

AR: Author's response | RR: Referee report | ED: Editor decision

ED: Publish subject to revisions (further review by Editor and Referees) (22 Feb 2017) by Peter Molnar

AR by Elena Cristiano on behalf of the Authors (04 Apr 2017) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Publish subject to revisions (further review by Editor and Referees) (18 Apr 2017) by Peter Molnar

ED: Referee Nomination & Report Request started (18 Apr 2017) by Peter Molnar

RR by Anonymous Referee #1 (30 Apr 2017)

Suggestions for revision or reasons for rejection

Dear Authors,

The revise version of the manuscript is much clearer and cleaner than the first submitted version, but I still found some imprecision in the text. I think that the manuscript will benefit from another revision of the text. I mainly recommend you to revise Section 6.3 and consider revising the discussion and conclusions section in the manuscript (see my comments below).

Specific comments
[Page Lines]

[3 3] “observation scale” – process scale?

[3 4] “climate variables” – should be rainfall instead as rainfall is the only climate variable discussed in this section.

[3 9-12] Please add references to support these statements.

[3 14] Although their work is important, I am pretty sure that Fowler et al were not the first to use downscaling for climate change impact study.

[3 24] “convective cells” – rainfall cells.

[3 27] “Muthusamy et al., 2016” – should be Muthusamy et al., 2017. Please check and update the reference list, there are some papers there that are in status of “in review” while they are already published/accepted for publication.

[3 28] “weather generator” – rainfall generator.

[4 8] the variable tc is mentioned twice in the paper. Here is refer to as “rainfall duration” and later is refer to as “time of concentration”. This is of course not the same. Please check that all variables are given a unique name and definition. Moreover, sometimes you indicate units to the variables and sometimes the variables are given without units, please be consists.

[7 10] In your discussion here (and later) I am missing the credit to Marshall–Palmer pioneer work (1948).

[7 17] “larger more”

[7 29] Recent studies shown the potential use of weather radar to estimate extreme rainfall intensities (e.g. Eldardiry et al., 2015; Marra and Morin, 2015 – both published in JOH). This, however, was done for much larger scales than the urban scale (so far). Consider if you would like to add this to your discussion.

[8 12-24] Entire section 3.2 – What is the significant contribution of this section to the understanding of urban drainage studies? The way I see this section now, it only inform the reader with some examples of how to classify a rainfall event. I don’t see it contribution to the paper. Consider removing or revising it significantly.

[8 26] This section must start with a definition of rainfall variability (space, time, climatological variability – there are many types, which all are later discussed).

[8 29] “decorrelation distance” – not all readers will know what you mean, please define.

[9 16] “Peleg et al., 2013” – this should be “Paschalis et al., 2013”.

[10 7-9] Support this with some references.

[10 15] “Although it is well known that not all rainfall turns into runoff” – this is a strong sentence, especially when later you give some examples where a large fraction of the rainfall is lost to ET even in urban catchments.

[11 12] “land cover” – in this section you mainly focus on different imperviousness and antecedent soil moisture conditions. You immediately start with a few examples, but first you need to explain the readers what you mean by land cover (roads? different vegetation? roof-types?).

[11 13-17] In a way this paragraph fit better to the previous or next section (4.2 or 4.4).

[12 15-16] “Errors in estimation of annual evaporation in urban areas may still be higher than 20% (van de Ven, 1990)” – I think that if you made this type of a statement it needs to be supported with a more recent reference.

[13 3] “80%” – for small events (less than 6 mm of rainfall, if I got it right from Versini et al. paper) and on monthly basis. Please be more precise here, as 80% reduction in peak discharge can sound like a large figure while the absolute differences can be relatively small.

[13 7-9] Can you supply some references to past studies?

[13 27] “appropriate scale” – do you mean gridded/spatially distributed?

[14 23] “…lack of representation of private connections” – this is not clear to me.

[15 25] “temporal variability” – should be climatological variability.

[15 25] “Peleg et al. (2016)” – should be Peleg et al. (2017) and the reference to needs to be add to the reference list: Peleg, N., Blumensaat, F., Molnar, P., Fatichi, S., and Burlando, P.: Partitioning the impacts of spatial and climatological rainfall variability in urban drainage modeling, Hydrol. Earth Syst. Sci., 21, 1559-1572, doi:10.5194/hess-21-1559-2017, 2017.

[16 4] “SST” can be removed.

[17 10] “Rainfall required resolutions is higher for small basins” – please revise.

[18 8] I think you are missing power at the right side of the equation.

[18 27] “Authors” – which?

Section 6.3 – I think this section is a most for the review, however I suggest the authors to revise it thoroughly. There are a lot of numbers and variables that are defined in this section and it is not clear what do message do you want the reader to have at the end. For example: the scaling factors at [18 13], how one can use them in urban studies? It is not clear. Another example: [19 6-7] seems to refer to the difference between spatial and temporal variability of rainfall (section 6.1) and not to the difference in resolution (which this section should address).

Discussion and conclusions – I feel there is some mix between these sections. First, I am not sure if in a review paper a “Conclusions” section is a most. The discussion is now more of a summary of the key points of your review (and in that sense, some of the points in the conclusion section can be moved to the discussion section). I would like to see a discussion that is focused around the current gaps in knowledge – what do we don’t know, where the research focus should be, etc.

Figure 2. Downscaling and upscaling arrows should be reversed. When you move from averaged area to spatially distributed points you are downscaling your data. Moreover, the arrows should not cover the range between point value (upper panel) to the pattern values (middle panel), as this process is neither downscaling nor upscaling.

Table 3. “intense peak inside” and “intensity rainfall lower” – not clear.

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RR by Anonymous Referee #2 (28 May 2017)

ED: Publish subject to minor revisions (further review by Editor) (15 Jun 2017) by Peter Molnar

AR by Elena Cristiano on behalf of the Authors (22 Jun 2017) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Publish as is (22 Jun 2017) by Peter Molnar

AR by Elena Cristiano on behalf of the Authors (23 Jun 2017)

Short summary

In the last decades, new instruments were developed to measure rainfall and hydrological processes at high resolution. Weather radars are used, for example, to measure how rainfall varies in space and time. At the same time, new models were proposed to reproduce and predict hydrological response, in order to prevent flooding in urban areas. This paper presents a review of our current knowledge of rainfall and hydrological processes in urban areas, focusing on their variability in time and space.