Department of Hydraulics and Hydrology, Czech Technical University in Prague, Thákurova 7, 165 00 Prague 6, Czech Republic E-mail:
Water Sci Technol. 2013;68(8):1810-8. doi: 10.2166/wst.2013.429.
The ability to predict the runoff response of an urban catchment to rainfall is crucial for managing drainage systems effectively and controlling discharges from urban areas. In this paper we assess the potential of commercial microwave links (MWL) to capture the spatio-temporal rainfall dynamics and thus improve urban rainfall-runoff modelling. Specifically, we perform numerical experiments with virtual rainfall fields and compare the results of MWL rainfall reconstructions to those of rain gauge (RG) observations. In a case study, we are able to show that MWL networks in urban areas are sufficiently dense to provide good information on spatio-temporal rainfall variability and can thus considerably improve pipe flow prediction, even in small subcatchments. In addition, the better spatial coverage also improves the control of discharges from urban areas. This is especially beneficial for heavy rainfall, which usually has a high spatial variability that cannot be accurately captured by RG point measurements.
预测城市流域对降雨的径流水文响应的能力对于有效管理排水系统和控制城市地区的排放至关重要。在本文中，我们评估了商业微波链路（MWL）捕捉时空降雨动态的潜力，从而改进城市降雨径流建模。具体而言，我们针对虚拟降雨场进行数值实验，并将 MWL 降雨重建的结果与雨量计（RG）观测的结果进行比较。在案例研究中，我们能够表明，城市地区的 MWL 网络足够密集，可以提供有关时空降雨变化的良好信息，因此即使在小的子流域中，也可以大大提高管流预测的准确性。此外，更好的空间覆盖范围还可以改善对城市地区排放的控制。这对于通常具有 RG 点测量无法准确捕捉的高空间变异性的强降雨特别有益。
