The present research develops a systematic application of a selected family of 11 well-known design storms, all of them obtained from the same rainfall data sample. Some of them are fully consistent with the intensity–duration–frequency (IDF) curves, while others are built according to typical observed patterns in the historical rainfall series. The employed data series consists on a high-resolution rainfall time series in Valencia (Spain), covering the period from 1990 to 2012. The goal of the research is the systematic comparison of these design storms, paying special attention to some relevant quantitative properties, as the maximum rainfall intensity, the total cumulative rainfall depth or the temporal pattern characterising the synthetic storm. For comparison purposes, storm duration was set to 1 h and return period equal to 25 years in all cases. The comparison is enhanced by using each of the design storms as rainfall input to a calibrated urban hydrology rainfall–runoff model, yielding to a family of hydrographs for a given neighbourhood of the city of Valencia (Spain). The discussion and conclusions derived from the present research refer to both, the comparison between design storms and the comparison of resulting hydrographs after the application of the mentioned rainfall–runoff model. Seven of the tested design storms yielded to similar overall performance, showing negligible differences in practice. Among them, only Average Variability Method (AVM) and Two Parameter Gamma function (G2P) incorporate in their definition a temporal pattern inferred from empirical patterns identified in the historical rainfall data used herein. The remaining four design storms lead to more significant discrepancies attending both to the rainfall itself and to the resulting hydrograph. Such differences are ~8% concerning estimated discharges.

The two-parameter gamma function (G2P) design storm is a recent methodology used to obtain synthetic hyetographs especially developed for urban hydrology applications. Further analytical developments on the G2P design storm are presented herein, linking the rainfall convectivity n-index with the shape parameter of the design storm. This step can provide a useful basis for future easy-to-handle rainfall inputs in the context of regional urban drainage studies. A practical application is presented herein for the case of Valencia (Spain), based on high-resolution time series of rainfall intensity. The resulting design storm captures certain internal statistics and features observed in the fine-scale rainfall intensity historical records. On the other hand, a direct, simple method is formulated to derivate the design storm from the intensity–duration–frequency (IDF) curves, making use of the analytical relationship with the n-index.

HIGHLIGHTS. Three-step methodology for regionalising the G2P design storm (DS) parameters is performed.Parameterisation is based on regional studies from o