Identifying representative rainstorm patterns in HongKong

Besides the rainfall amount and duration, the time distribution of rainfall intensity during the storm is also a very important information in rainfall-runoff modeling. More than 5000 rainstorm events based on hourly data over Hong Kong were extracted. A procedure using statistical cluster analysis is applied to identify event-based representative storm temporal patterns in Hong Kong. To facilitate proper selection of rainstorm pattern, factors affecting the occurrence of various storm patterns were examined using statistical contingency tests by which the interdependence between the occurrence of storm patterns and elevation, storm depth and duration, as well as season are investigated.