Characterizing heavy rainfall events associated with major floods in Haiti
Résumé
During the last decades, more than thirty major floods have been recorded in almost all of Haiti's departments. These recurrent floods have highlighted the high vulnerability of the Haitian territory to hydro-meteorological hazards. The heavy rainfall events that generate these major floods need to be characterized. This first characterization work will serve as a basis and can then be used to anticipate the damage that may be generated by future episodes of heavy rainfall. At present, there is no reference data (rain gauges / streamflow with long series without gaps) to characterize the associated hazards. But BRGM (Terrier et al., 2017) has listed notable floods of the last decades.
Recent work comparing gridded rainfall estimates to reference data in the Lesser and Greater Antilles has shown that MSWEP gridded rainfall estimates (Beck et al., 2019) perform best, especially for heavy rainfall. In this context, our work consists in using the second version of MSWEP, available from 1979 to 2017 with a spatio-temporal resolution of 0.1°/ 3h, to characterize the heavy rainfall events associated with the significant floods listed by BRGM. In other words, to study the rainfall totals, duration, distribution of maximums as well as the atmospheric weather patterns associated with these heavy rainfall events.
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