Influence of Changes of Catchment Permeability and Frequency of Rainfall on Critical Storm Duration in an Urbanized Catchment—A Case Study, Cracow, Poland

Abstract

The increase of impermeable areas in a catchment is known to elevate flood risk. To adequately understand and plan for these risks, changes in the basin water cycle must be quantified as imperviousness increases, requiring the use of hydrological modeling to obtain design runoff volumes and peak flow rates. A key stage of modeling is adopting the structure of the model and estimating its parameters. Due to the fact that most impervious basins are uncontrolled, hydrological models that do not require parameter calibration are advantageous. At the same time, it should be remembered that these models are sensitive to the values of assumed parameters. The purpose of this work is to determine the effect of catchment impermeability on the flow variability in the Sudół Dominikański stream in Cracow, Poland, and assess the influence of the frequency of rainfall on values of time of concentration (here it is meant as critical storm duration). The major finding in this work is that the critical storm duration for all different scenarios of catchment imperviousness depends on the rainfall exceedance probability. In the case of rainfall probability lower than 5.0%, the critical storm duration was equal to 2 h, for higher probabilities (p ≥ 50%) it was equal to 24 h. Simulations showed that the increase of impermeable areas caused peak time abbreviation. In the case of rainfall with exceedance probability p = 1.0% and critical storm duration Dkr = 2 h, the peak time decreased about 12.5% and for impermeable areas increased from 22.01 to 44.95%.

The Impact of Spatiotemporal Changes in Land Development (1984–2019) on the Increase in the Runoff Coefficient in Erbil, Kurdistan Region of Iraq

“…Figure 8 shows the evolution of built-up areas from 1984 to 2019. The current study, supported by previous research in this area, demonstrates that increasing urban development in flood plain zones will boost peak discharge, reduce the time to peak, and increase the runoff volume [2,29,[71][72][73][74]. The findings of this study indicate that urbanization resulted in an increased risk of urban flash floods.…”

Determination of Pollution and Environmental Risk Assessment of Stormwater and the Receiving River, Case Study of the Sudół River Catchment, Poland

“…The aforementioned papers analyze ways to identify and quantify this impact, showing the most commonly used ways to model the impact of sealing include hydrological models such as HydroCAD, L-THIA, MIKE Products, MOUSE, MUSIC, SWAT, SWMM, and others. Additionally, modeling the surface runoff by applying the Soil Conservation Service Curve Number method (SCS-CN) is used [58][59][60][61][62][63].…”

Environmental Flow Requirements of Estuaries: Providing Resilience to Current and Future Climate and Direct Anthropogenic Changes

“…River flow regimes are largely determined by meteorological processes (e.g., precipitation from rainfall or snowfall, and air temperature, which affect snowmelt and evaporation rates; #7a and b Figure 1), and by human alterations to watercourses (e.g., dams and water extraction; Leblanc et al, 2012;Zeiringer et al, 2018, as well as straightening and channelisation). Urbanisation affects the volume and quality of river flow from increases in impervious surfaces and modification of rainfall-runoff ratios and water quality (McGrane, 2016;Strohbach et al, 2019;Wałęga et al, 2019) as well as increases in temperature.…”