Rainfall Frequency (Design Storm) Estimates from the US National
Weather Service
Description
Estimates of rainfall at desired frequency (e.g., 1% annual
chance or 100-year return period) and desired duration (e.g.,
24-hour duration) are often required in the design of dams and other
hydraulic structures, catastrophe risk modeling, environmental
planning and management. One major source of such estimates for the
USA is the NOAA National Weather Service's (NWS) division of
Hydrometeorological Design Studies Center (HDSC). Raw data from
NWS-HDSC is available at 1-km resolution and comes as a huge number
of GIS files. This package provides functionality to easily access
and analyze the 1-km GIS files provided by NWS' PF Data Server for
the entire USA. This package also comes with datasets on record point
rainfall measurements provided by NWS-HDSC.