Análisis de la variabilidad espacio temporal de la precipitación en la ciudad de Cuenca durante el período febrero – julio de 2014

Abstract

Due rainfall plays a key role in the functioning of urban hydrological models, it becomes necessary the use of information close to reality, so identifying the spatio temporal rainfall variability is an important step to get better results. In the present study the spatio temporal rainfall variability was analyzed based on the records from 8 rain gauges distributed on the city of Cuenca at 2550 m a.s.l. during the rainy period February-July 2014. The average distance between stations was 5 km with a maximum distance of 11.9 km. The study revealed that the sensors show a variation of 35.61% in the accumulated volume of rain, finding two zones with well defined characteristics. The first is located in the CM sensor, which keeps the lower correlations in every temporal scale analyzed and has the least amount of rain found (289 mm). The second is located in the QB sensor which has the largest volume of rain (442 mm) and maintains the best correlations with the nearest stations, even for the temporal scale of 5 min (r > 0.4), therefore precipitation occurs in a major way increasing the risk of flooding. Extreme events mostly have a preferential direction from east to west with highly convective features and ranging in peak intensities at 5, 30 and 60 minutes from 63, 23 and 18 mm/h respectively.