Climate change and its influence on design rainfall at-site in New South Wales State, Australia

Quantification of rainfall is needed for planning, designing and operation of water engineering projects. Although there is lot of research on design rainfall in the literature, there is a lack of research considering the impact of climate change on design rainfall. This study focuses on the assessment of the impact of climate changes on design rainfall using data from New South Wales (NSW), Australia. Future stationary and non-stationary intensity–frequency–duration (IFD) curves have been estimated using generalized extreme value (GEV) distribution. The maximum-likelihood estimation method is employed to estimate the parameters of the GEV models. It has been found that the consideration of the climatic change on the rainfall data of the selected station confirms that the simulation exhibits non-stationary behaviour on the IFD curve data. In addition, the results show that when the future period increases, the relative differences between the stationary and nonstationary IFD curves generally increase. Comparison of the new IFD curves estimated in this study with the Australian Rainfall and Runoff (ARR) IFD curves demonstrates that there is a better match between the ARR IFD curves and the new stationary IFD curves compared with the non-stationary IFD curves.