project 3

There is a growing scientific and public consensus about the impact of changing climatic patterns on the intensification of extreme rainfall events. Existing storm water infrastructure systems fail to adequately respond to the changing extreme storm events since they are designed with older manuals based on historical rainfall records. Thus, there needs to be a re-examination of the frequency and intensity of rainfall projections. A comprehensive, reproducible, and consistent methodology to process the projections and develop updated Intensity-Duration-Frequency (IDF) curves is needed for infrastructure design and management.

This project is the first to propose such a comprehensive framework to apply multiple approaches to the precipitation projection for Texas. The study will apply an array of traditional statistical methods and machine learning (ML) models to update the IDF curves for Texas for the next 80 years. The method will be scalable and transferable to other locations, thus enabling the scientific community and engineers to better adapt to future rainfall patterns.