Urban hydrological processes are characterised by high spatial variability and short response times resulting from a high degree imperviousness. Therefore, urban catchments are especially sensitive to space-time variability of precipitation at small scales. High resolution precipitation measurement in cities is crucial to properly describe and analyse urban hydrological response. At the same time, urban vertical structure poses specific challenges to obtaining representative precipitation measurement, while horizontal variability does the same to characterisation of catchment properties.

This session focuses on high resolution precipitation measurement in cities and approaches to modelling urban catchment properties and hydrological response;
- Novel techniques for high resolution precipitation measurement in cities and approaches for merging remote sensing data with in situ measurements to obtain representation of urban precipitation fields;
- Novel approaches to modelling urban catchment properties and hydrological response, from physics-based models, fully and semi-distributed modelling to stochastic and statistical conceptualisation;
- Applications of measured precipitation fields in urban hydrological models to understand and characterise urban hydrological variability and predict hydrological response.