New rainfall tracker to help combat erosion and runoff
Published on 09 May, 2007
Dr Yeboah Gyasi-Agyei presented a seminar at the Queensland Climate Change Centre of Excellence in Brisbane last weekA hydrology and water engineer, based at Central Queensland University, has developed a strategy to help combat water runoff and erosion damage.
Dr Yeboah Gyasi-Agyei said the design of strategies to control runoff and erosion often required information on individual rain storms at a fine timescale. This is particularly true for regions where few rain storms of short duration within a year account for a large proportion of runoff and erosion damage.
The need for minute-by-minute information on short duration hydrological processes increases where slopes are steep, as on railway or highway batters.
"Unfortunately, fine timescale rainfall data are limited worldwide due to the high cost of obtaining and storing such data. Usually, available long records of rainfall data are on a daily timescale," Dr Gyasi-Agyei explained.
"The need for a model to disaggregate daily rainfall into a sequence of individual storms of finer timescale cannot be overemphasised."
Dr Gyasi-Agyei has developed a computer model for disaggregating daily rainfall at any location in Australia to a 6-minute timescale.
The possibility of linking his model to daily, or global circulation, models that can capture the inter-annual variability of the rainfall process for simulation beyond the number of years of record is also being explored.
Dr Gyasi-Agyei has worked on the problem of daily rainfall disaggregation as a spin-off research for the last 10 years, and has published 6 papers on this subject in reputable international journals.
Last week he presented a seminar on his model to 20 scientists at the Queensland Climate Change Centre of Excellence in Brisbane.
Invited by Alan Beswick, Senior Agro Meteorological Scientist at the Centre, this was the first step of a potential collaborative research project in linking the stochastic daily rainfall disaggregation model to the SILO Data Drill facility maintained by the Queensland Department of Natural Resources and Water.