Storm Tracking based on Rain Gauges for Flooding Control in Urban Areas

Abstract The fervent urbanization process coupled with the climate changes has been generating a series of more frequent and intense floods all over the world. Although flood risk can never be completely eradicated, its impacts require to be reduced by either improving the modelling of urban drainage systems and deepening the knowledge of flood produced by extreme storm rainfalls. The detailed study of urban drainage networks plays a fundamental role not only on problems related to flooding phenomena that are repeated with increasing frequency, but also on issue related to water quality of run-off (Piro et al., 2012). The objective of the study is to demonstrate the rainfall tracking prediction can be accurately performed in areas where radar measurements are not available, by using a dense network of rain gauges. The results of numerous storm tracking studies reveal that the choice of the hyetograph feature is a very difficult task (Hindi et al., 1977; Felgate et al., 1975; Shaw, 1983). In this study the storm tracking was studied on the basis of the method proposed by Diskin (1990). The methodology proposed has been applied to data from a network of rain gauges distributed over an area of about 1,600 km2 around the city of London, UK. The results demonstrate how rain gauges, that are more approachable than radars for either economical and practical reasons, are very useful in forecasting the movements of storm events in the monitored area.