Comparison of Nonstationary Regional Flood Frequency Analysis Techniques Based on the Index-Flood Approach
Publication: Journal of Hydrologic Engineering
Volume 25, Issue 7
Abstract
Regional flood frequency analysis (RFFA) techniques are used in hydrological applications for estimation of design quantiles at ungauged sites or catchments with sparse observational records. The index-flood method, a popular approach for RFFA, is based on the assumption that the flood records within a homogeneous region are identically distributed, except for a site-specific index flood. Because of rapidly changing land-use patterns, human interventions, and climate change, recent studies proposed extension of the index-flood method to account for nonstationarity in flood records. This work compared index-flood–based nonstationary RFFA techniques, in both synthetically generated and real-world homogeneous regions, with sites marked by significant trends in flood records. From the data used in the analysis, it is evident that two recently proposed transformation-based approaches are more suitable compared to other methods, and can capture time-varying behavior of floods effectively.
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Data Availability Statement
The data generated or used during the study are available from Water Survey of Canada’s HYDAT database. The R codes for the synthetic flood data generation and analysis are available from the corresponding author by request.
Acknowledgments
This work was supported by the Ministry of Human Resource Development, Government of India, and the INSPIRE Faculty Award, Department of Science and Technology, Grant No. DST/INSPIRE/04/2015/001548, Government of India. The authors also thank the Ministry of Human Resource Development, Government of India, for funding the Ph.D. scholarship for Chingka Kalai; Environment and Climate Change, Canada, for making the flood data for the Canadian region available through the HYDAT database free of charge to the public (National Water Data Archive 2016) contributors to the R packages Kendall and extRemes. The authors also thank R. Bharath for his help with downloading the HYDAT database, and Nicole O’Brien for clarifications of her paper.
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Published In
Journal of Hydrologic Engineering
Volume 25 • Issue 7 • July 2020
Copyright
©2020 American Society of Civil Engineers.
History
Received: Jun 27, 2019
Accepted: Feb 4, 2020
Published online: Apr 28, 2020
Published in print: Jul 1, 2020
Discussion open until: Sep 28, 2020
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