What are the best covariates for developing non-stationary rainfall Intensity-Duration-Frequency relationship?

Present infrastructure design is primarily based on rainfall Intensity-Duration-Frequency (IDF) curves with so-called stationary assumption. However, in recent years, the extreme precipitation events are increasing due to global climate change and creating non-stationarity in the series. Based on recent theoretical developments in the Extreme Value Theory (EVT), recent studies proposed a methodology for developing non-stationary rainfall IDF curve by incorporating trend in the parameters of the Generalized Extreme Value (GEV) distribution using Time covariate. But, the covariate Time may not be the best covariate and it is important to analyze all possible covariates and find the best covariate to model non-stationarity. In this study, five physical processes, namely, urbanization, local temperature changes, global warming, El Nifio-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) cycle and Indian Ocean Dipole (IOD) are used as covariates. Based on these five covariates and their possible combinations, sixty-two non-stationary GEV models are constructed. In addition, two non-stationary GEV models based on Time covariate and one stationary GEV model are also constructed. The best model for each duration rainfall series is chosen based on the corrected Akaike Information Criterion (AICc). From the findings of this study, it is observed that the local processes (i.e., Urbanization, local temperature changes) are the best covariate for short duration rainfall and global processes (i.e., Global warming, ENSO cycle and IOD) are the best covariate for the long duration rainfall of the Hyderabad city, India. Furthermore, the covariate Time is never qualified as the best covariate. In addition, the identified best covariates are further used to develop non-stationary rainfall IDF curves of the Hyderabad city. The proposed methodology can be applied to other situations to develop the non-stationary IDF curves based on the best covariate. (C) 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.