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Flood hydrologic response is influenced by rainfall structure (i.e., variability in space and time). How this structure shapes flood frequency is unknown, and flood frequency analyses typically neglect or simplify potentially important aspects of rainfall variability. This study seeks to understand how rainfall structure impacts flood frequency. We use stochastic storm transposition combined with a 15-year record of hourly, 4-km(2) radar rainfall to generate 10,000 synthetic extreme rain events. These events are resampled into four scenarios with differing spatial and temporal resolutions, which are used as input to a distributed hydrologic model. Analysis of variance is used to identify the proportions of total flood peak variability attributable to spatial and to temporal rainfall variability under two antecedent soil moisture conditions. We simulate peak discharges for recurrence intervals of 2 to 500years for 1,343 subwatersheds ranging in size from 16 to 4,400km(2) in Turkey River in the Midwestern United States, which is situated in a typically humid continental climactic region. Antecedent soil moisture modulates the role of rainfall structure in simulated flood response, particularly for more frequent events and large watershed scales. Rainfall spatial structure is more important than temporal structure for drainage areas larger than approximately 2,000km(2) (approximately 200km(2)) for wet (dry) initial soil conditions, especially when soils are dry, while the reverse is true for smaller subwatersheds. The results appear to be related to the differing propensities for surface and subsurface runoff production as a function of basin scale, event magnitude, and soil saturation. Our results suggest that hydrologic model-based flood frequency analyses, and particularly efforts attempting to spanning a range of scales, must carefully consider rainfall structure.

Plain Language Summary There is increasing interest in derived flood frequency analysis: the use of stochastically generated rainfall and high-resolution distributed hydrologic models to understand current and future flood frequency. Potential issues surrounding rainfall structure, resolution, and accuracy in this context have received very little attention, however. Design storm methods, common in hydrologic engineering practice, use highly idealized assumptions regarding rainfall space-time structure, and the consequences of these assumptions are poorly understood. This study seeks to better understand how flood frequency is affected by rainfall spatial and temporal structure, as well as how these effects are modulated by watershed initial conditions (i.e., antecedent soil moisture). The findings, which are summarized in the manuscript's abstract, should be useful for future researchers and practitioners. We believe that this work constitutes a useful contribution in the effort to advance the derived flood frequency analysis.