Assessment of the effect of extreme rainfall events on temporal rainfall variability in Kuwait
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Assessment of the effect of extreme rainfall events on temporal rainfall variability in Kuwait Habib Al-Qallaf 1 & Amjad Aliewi 1 & Ahmed Abdulhadi 2 Received: 16 May 2020 / Accepted: 2 October 2020 # Saudi Society for Geosciences 2020
Abstract In recent decades, Kuwait is witnessing an increase in the number of flash floods, which puts a serious risk on human lives and properties. During November 2018, the highest extreme rainfall event was recorded in Kuwait. This paper aims at investigating the frequency of occurrence of extreme rainfall events and their effect on the temporal variability of rainfall in Kuwait. Statistical methods were implemented, such as frequency analysis of annual maximum hourly and daily rainfalls, in addition to the cumulative departure from the mean (CDM) to analyze the effect of extreme rainfall events on the temporal pattern of rainfall in Kuwait. The results show that the total annual rainfall is very wide from 31 mm in 1964 to 344 mm in 2018, while the general trend of rainfall in Kuwait is increasing with time. The statistical analysis based on developing suitable cumulative density functions for rainfall events in Kuwait shows that the return periods of the annual maximum hourly (41.5 mm/h) and the annual maximum daily (103.1 mm/day) rainfall events were 50 and 155 years, respectively. The analysis show that without the rainfall data of 2018, 49% of the CDM curve remains above the average limit of 112 mm/year. However, when the extreme rainfall events of 2018 are included in the analysis, only 11% of the CDM curve remains above the mean line of the new average limit of 116 mm. The study concluded that the rainfall pattern of Kuwait is affected considerably by extreme rainfall events and the amount of rainfall increases against reduction in number of days in the recent decades, which accordingly increases the rainfall intensities to produce more flash floods. Keywords Rainfall temporal variability . Extreme rainfall events . Frequency analysis . CDM
Introduction The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) made a link between changes in the large-scale hydrological cycle and rainfall variability mainly rainfall intensity. Overall, precipitation has generally increased over the land north of 30° N, but a decreasing trend is evident from 10° S to 30° N between the years 1900 and 2000 (Bates et al. 2008). A number of authors studied rainfall variability in Kuwait and the This article is part of the Topical Collection on Recent advanced techniques in water resources management * Habib Al-Qallaf [email protected] 1
Water Research Center, Kuwait Institute for Scientific Research, Kuwait City, Kuwait
2
Science & Technology Sector, Kuwait Institute for Scientific Research, Kuwait City, Kuwait
Arab region, and they came out with different conclusions. Tao et al. (2003) stated that rainfall is expected to be less in the Arabian Peninsula. This is supported by World Bank (2005) study, which anticipates that the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries will
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