Evaluation of Mixed-Population Flood-Frequency Analysis
Publication: Journal of Hydrologic Engineering
Volume 6, Issue 1
Abstract
A mixed population of flood flows was shown to cause quality-of-fit problems if a single-population flood-frequency distribution was used to describe the flood data. The three populations in this mix were “ordinary,” tropical cyclone, and ice-jam–release floods. Parametric descriptions of the single and separated flood populations were evaluated using probability-plot correlation-coefficient tests. These tests quantified how well the flood-probability distributions agreed with plotting-position descriptions of the data and quantified the differences due to the mixed-population analysis. High outliers caused the high skewness found in the single-population analyses. The tropical cyclone component was underestimated by single-population analyses at gauging stations in Massachusetts that had little data.
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Information & Authors
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Published In
Journal of Hydrologic Engineering
Volume 6 • Issue 1 • January 2001
Pages: 62 - 70
History
Received: Apr 24, 1996
Published online: Jan 1, 2001
Published in print: Jan 2001
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