Extreme storms in Malmo, Sweden

• Short-term very intensive storms in the years 1980-2007 from rain gauges in Malmo have been analysed to find intensities of long return periods and to investigate trends. Observations from different stations have been pooled into series to which probability functions have been adjusted. Quality control of short-term precipitation records is emphasized. In order to investigate whether high rain intensities are different today compared to back in time, new and old rain data have been compared. Trends over the last 25 years have been computed for storms of duration 10 min to 1 h, and for 89 years of daily rains. A literature review of investigations of changing rain intensities is presented. It is found that 10- to 25-year long rain series from single stations are too short to give good estimates of storms of long recurrence time because a single event influences much. The largest observed rains in Malmo in the investigated period have a return period of about 20-50 years. For the very short-term storms, 50-year old intensity-duration-frequency curves do not differ much from those derived from new data. Trend analysis shows changing short-term high storm intensities only for storms of 10-min duration. (C) Copyright. 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Subject headings

TEKNIK OCH TEKNOLOGIER  -- Samhällsbyggnadsteknik -- Vattenteknik (hsv//swe)

ENGINEERING AND TECHNOLOGY  -- Civil Engineering -- Water Engineering (hsv//eng)

Keyword

quality control

trends

extreme events

urban storms

Publication and Content Type

art (subject category)

ref (subject category)