It's not your total depth.

So if you think about like a six-inch rain event, obviously it's going to
have a very different peak flow rate if that six inches happens in 30 minutes compared to 36
hours, right? And we're not looking at total flow volume. or flow rate over time that's not
something that the rational method is capable of calculating. It only does peak flow rate so we
need to know what the rainfall intensity is. And if we're looking at rainfall intensity over time,
then we need to look at the basically the peak rainfall intensity, particularly peak rainfall intensity
happening after the time of concentration. We'll talk a little bit about that as we go on. And then
of course your watershed area which is going to contribute you know a larger volumetric flow
rate over time depending on its on its area so this method's been around a long time it's very
simple and accurate to use as we mentioned and it works pretty well for watersheds up to 200
acres once you get beyond that you're probably going to want to start looking at different
methods because of infiltration rates and very long time of concentrations might start to
decrease the accuracy here. And, you know, there's no series data. You're not going to be able
to prepare hydrographs using this. But it's great for culvert design, storm sewers, sometimes
facility design like bioretention facilities. And I pulled some of this information. It's available from
a number of sources. Some of this information was pulled from the Washington Department of
Transportation. I think they call it the Hydrology Manual, published in 2019. So it's recent, and
it's really quite good if you want to follow up on some more information there. Okay, so the
rational method. Let's break it down. The peak flow rate, in this case, you know, you can use
different...
Units, as long as they're consistent, it's very common, at least in the US, to use cubic feet per
second or acre feet per hour or something like that. Your runoff coefficient is dimensionless, so I
clipped this little bit of a table here, a really old one, I think it's from 88, from the National
Resource Conservation Service. And so you can see there's a lot of different ranges for different
land uses. They can really get quite specific with different slopes. Of course, higher slope is
going to produce more runoff, right, because it has less chance to infiltrate. It's going to be
moving at higher velocity. And in general, more pervious areas are going to have less runoff
because it's going to infiltrate. It's more pervious, right?
And something like a parking lot, perved area I mean, a paved area or a roof is going to
generate more runoff because, you know, it's impervious, right? So it's going to produce runoff
very quickly and tend to have a lot of volume. And you can see that from like heavy industrial
areas and urban areas having a larger runoff coefficient. And these ranges, you know, typically
you might pick a middle of the ground, you know, average range there between, like, say, for
industrial, let's see if i uh light light industrial area 0.5 to 0.8 you might pick, you know, right in
the middle there. Unless, if you know it's like older um older infrastructure you might have less
runoff because maybe the concrete's more cracked, the materials become more rough, it's
going to maybe become more pervious over time.
or if, you know, the opposite, if it's very new or maybe if it includes green infrastructure, but also
if you have larger storm event, like less frequent larger storm events like a hundred year storm
event because when you get very large storm events like that they tend to produce much higher
runoff because they're very less impacted by things like infiltration. There's the amount of runoff
happening is just so much that that there's really no opportunity for it to be infiltrated. So rainfall
intensity we talked about. We'll talk a little bit more about that. And then watershed area is pretty
self-explanatory for the most part. But the thing is, most watersheds are not one type of land
use, right? So it can get a little bit complicated, and we're going to look at that in this example.
We're only going to do one example today. And, wow, we're already at six minutes, so i'm going
to try to move things along uh so in this case, we're going to look at a 150 acre watershed and
we have these um characteristics of the watershed in this table here. So we have three different
land uses that we're looking at. and the coverage for that land use throughout the watershed,
how much of it is residential, how much is industrial or woodland. And then I went ahead and
picked a coefficient for you that I'll be using if you want to use the same coefficient or if you want
to look them up in a table. Note that woodland's not in that table because that was an urban
table, but there are rural tables as well.
And then next to that we have something called frequency intensity duration storm curve. And
this is where we compare storm duration to rainfall intensity and then the return period or
frequency. So this is where we're talking about like a two year, five year, hundred year storm
event, which just in very brief description means the largest storm event likely to be seen in that
period of time. You know, it's more to it, of course, but that's a pretty quick comparison. So we're
going to look at, for this example, a 30-minute duration, five-year storm. So we'll be using that
information, and then we'll be neglecting the time of concentration. Now, why did I throw that in
there? Time of concentration has to do, again, very brief description.
It's not really doing it justice, but it has to do with... the maximum, or the amount of time it takes
for the entire watershed to contribute to a drainage area. So, for example, can i draw, let's find
out. So if we have this watershed and, you know, it's going to start collecting water as it runs off,
basically, once this entire watershed is discharging from its discharge point, then that's the time
of concentration. So at whatever, for any particular droplet of water at some point, whatever the
longest amount of time it takes to get out of the watershed, that's time of concentration. And the
reason we care about that is because when you have variable rain frequency, or variable rain
intensities, we want to make sure we pick one after that
time of concentration because that time of concentration is when you would expect it to be the
highest peak flow rate. So we're going to pick an intensity after that. Okay, in this case we're
neglecting it though, but I wanted to include that description just in case it comes up on like
maybe a problem someone's doing or in conversation. I didn't want people to get tripped up or
caught off guard. That's all you need to solve this problem. But if you're a little bit unsure, I can
throw in a hint for you. But if you're feeling confident and you think you can take it on, I
recommend pausing the video, giving it a shot. You know, certainly practice is the best way to
learn and get better.
So go for it. I'll see you when you get back. If you need a little bit of a hint, I will say that the
biggest part here is how to handle this multiple land use and coverage. You know, obviously,
mathematically, there's different ways of doing that, but the easiest way, and the way that most
people are going to do it, and you'll see it done in textbooks or whatever, is to do a weighted
average of your coefficient. You know, that's going to get you done quickest and easiest. So, if
that helps, if you think you got it now, give it a shot. I'll see you when you get back. Okay,
welcome back. Hope that went well. Let's get started on this. What was mentioned, you're
gonna wanna do a weighted average.
The easiest way to do that, or really the way to do that, is to multiply your area that we, so we
have 150 total, right? Can I write on this? 150 AC for our total watershed. So, you know, 0.4