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Although improvements in computer hardware and software programming have allowed water quality models to become ever more complex and comprehensive, models continue to be limited by input data that drive them. The goal of this paper is to compare alternative techniques that can be used to define a typical year of rainfall. The intent of a typical year of rainfall is to represent long-term impacts of rainfall without having to run a model for extended periods and the associated extended computational time. Such information will benefit modelers and design professionals who seek to compare alternative treatment train scenarios by allowing them to quickly look at many more situations, i.e., use of a typical year would require only about one-fiftieth of the computational time that running a 50-years period would take.