Sewer Flow Prediction at a Large Urban Scale: Influence of Radar Rainfall Spatial Resolution

Abstract

There is a growing interest in using radar rainfall data to evaluate the performance of urban drainage systems in near real time. This paper describes a study based on a large (55 km2) urban catchment in northern Italy. Different spatial resolutions of radar data have been compared and used as input to a numerical hydrological-hydraulic model of the drainage system, constructed by means of Infoworks CS software. The results show that the spatial resolution of weather radar data plays a significant role when modelling the hydrological behaviour of the drainage system and using different resolutions may result in significant differences in peak flows and runoff volumes.