A dense network of rain gauges within an urban area: Rainfall uncertainty and variability

This study presents a new high density rain gauges network installed in urban area to study spatio-temporal structure and variability of precipitation at small scales. The preliminary results concerning gauges calibration and characterization of the rainfall spatial variability at fine scale are discussed.

In urban areas, the impervious surfaces connected to the drainage system leads to highly dynamic flows. The flood and runoff risk characterization requires  fine spatiotemporal scale to describe hydrological model input data :rainfall within spatial scale of less than 1km and temporal scale close to 1minis necessary for urban hydrological applications and risk assessment. In order to characterize small-scale rainfall spatiotemporal variability, a dense rain gauges network is deployed at Montpellier (France) with inter-gauges distances from 100m to 1km. Currently, 9 tipping bucket rain gauges  associated with 9 anemometers are acquiring rainfall and wind norm intensity every minutes. The network density and extension will be increased soon.

The first year measurements highlight a spatial variability of the 1-minute rainfall at the subkilometer scale. This observed variability is analyzed in view of the measurement uncertainty (gauge calibration, gauge error, bias due to the gauge location) to identify the natural rainfall variability.

This contribution presents the new densely extensive rainfall  network measurement, the typing bucket raingauge calibration and highlights that the observed 1-minute rainfall intensity variability  is significant and cannot be only explained by the measurement uncertainties.