Time distribution of intense rainfalls at Campinas, Brazil

The temporal variation of intense rainfalls is of great importance in hydrological analyses and prediction, which is required for dimensioning engineering projects. Therefore, this study has as objective to determine the temporal distribution of intense rainfalls with durations of 1, 2 and 4 h in Campinas, state of Sao Paulo, Brazil, for the period from 1997 to 2016. The rainfalls with duration of 1 h were subdivided in three intervals of 20 min. Rainfalls with duration of 2 and 4 h were subdivided in four intervals each, respectively of 1 h for the latter and of 30 min for the former. For rainfalls of 1, 2 and 4 h, the early rain distribution prevailed, i.e., the rainfall is more intense in the first period of time, regardless the total and duration of the event. Statistically, the intensive rainfall data adjusted to the Lognormal and Truncated Negative Binomial probability distributions.