Probable maximum precipitation 24 hours estimation: A case study of Zanjan province of Iran

One of the primary concerns in designing civil structures such as water storage dams and irrigation and drainage networks is to find economic scale based on possibility of natural incidents such as floods, earthquake, etc. Probable maximum precipitation (PMP) is one of well known methods, which helps design a civil structure, properly. In this paper, we study the maximum one-day precipitation using 17 to 50 years of information in 13 stations located in province of Zanjan, Iran. The proposed study of this paper uses two Hershfield methods, where the first one yields 18.17 to 18.48 for precipitation where the PMP24 was between 170.14 mm and 255.28 mm. The second method reports precipitation between 2.29 and 4.95 while PMP24 was between 62.33 mm and 92.08 mm. In addition, when the out of range data were deleted from the study of the second method, precipitation rates were calculated between 2.29 and 4.31 while PMP24 was between 76.08 mm and 117.28 mm. The preliminary results indicate that the second Hershfield method provide more stable results than the first one.