International audienceUrban catchments are typically characterised by high spatial variability and fast runoff processes resulting in short response times. Hydrological analysis of such catchments requires high resolution precipitation and catchment information to properly represent catchment response. This study investigated the impact of rainfall input resolution on the outputs of detailed hydrodynamic models of seven urban catchments in North-West Europe. The aim was to identify critical rainfall resolutions for urban catchments to properly characterise catchment response. Nine storm events measured by a dual-polarimetric X-band weather radar, located in the Cabauw Experimental Site for Atmospheric Research (CESAR) of the Netherlands, were selected for analysis. Based on the original radar estimates, at 100m and 1min resolutions, 15 different combinations of coarser spatial and temporal resolutions, up to 3000m and 10min, were generated. These estimates were then applied to the operational semi-distributed hydrodynamic models of the urban catchments, all of which have similar size (between 3 and 8km2), but different morphological, hydrological and hydraulic characteristics. When doing so, methodologies for standardising model outputs and making results comparable were implemented. Results were analysed in the light of storm and catchment characteristics. Three main features were observed in the results: (1) the impact of rainfall input resolution decreases rapidly as catchment drainage area increases; (2) in general, variations in temporal resolution of rainfall inputs affect hydrodynamic modelling results more strongly than variations in spatial resolution; (3) there is a strong interaction between the spatial and temporal resolution of rainfall input estimates. Based upon these results, methods to quantify the impact of rainfall input resolution as a function of catchment size and spatial-temporal characteristics of storms are proposed and discussed. © 2015 The Authors

International audienceThis paper aims at quantifying the uncertainty on urban runoff associated with the unmeasured small scale rainfall variability, i.e. at a resolution finer than 1. km. ×. 1. km. ×. 5. min which is usually available with C-band radar networks. A case study is done on the 900. ha urban catchment of Cranbrook (London). A frontal and a convective rainfall event are analysed. An ensemble prediction approach is implemented, that is to say an ensemble of realistic downscaled rainfall fields is generated with the help of universal multifractals, and the corresponding ensemble of hydrographs is simulated. It appears that the uncertainty on the simulated peak flow is significant, reaching for some conduits 25% and 40% respectively for the frontal and the convective events. The flow corresponding the 90% quantile, the one simulated with radar distributed rainfall, and the spatial resolution are power law related. © 2012 Elsevier B.V

radar - rain gauge comparison, Universal Multifractals, downscalingInternational audienceRain gauges and weather radars do not measure rainfall at the same scale; roughly 20 cm for the former and 1 km for the latter. This significant scale gap is not taken into account by standard comparison tools (e.g. cumulative depth curves, normalized bias, RMSE) despite the fact that rainfall is recognized to exhibit extreme variability at all scales. In this paper we suggest to revisit the debate of the representativeness of point measurement by explicitly modelling small scale rainfall variability with the help of Universal Multifractals. First the downscaling process is validated with the help of a dense networks of 16 disdrometers (in Lausanne, Switzerland), and one of 16 rain gauges (Bradford, United Kingdom) both located within a 1 km2 area. Second this downscaling process is used to evaluate the impact of small scale (i.e.: sub - radar pixel) rainfall variability on the standard indicators. This is done with rainfall data from the Seine-Saint-Denis County (France). Although not explaining all the observed differences, it appears that this impact is significant which suggests changing some usual practice