Frequency Analysis of Floods - A Nanoparametric Approach

Floods cause widespread damage to property and life in different parts of the world. Hence there is a paramount need to develop effective methods for design flood estimation to alleviate risk associated with these extreme hydrologic events. Methods that are conventionally considered for analysis of floods focus on estimation of continuous frequency relationship between peak flow observed at a location and its corresponding exceedance probability depicting the plausible conditions in the planning horizon. These methods are commonly known as at-site flood frequency analysis (FFA) procedures. The available FFA procedures can be classified as parametric and nonparametric. Parametric methods are based on the assumption that sample (at-site data) is drawn from a population with known probability density function (PDF). Those procedures have uncertainty associated with the choice of PDF and the method for estimation of its parameters. Moreover, parametric methods are ineffective in modeling flood data if multimodality is evident in their PDF. To overcome those artifacts, a few studies attempted using kernel based nonparametric (NP) methods as an alternative to parametric methods. The NP methods are data driven and they can characterize the uncertainty in data without prior assumptions as to the form of the PDF. Conventional kernel methods have shortcomings associated with boundary leakage problem and normal reference rule (considered for estimation of bandwidth), which have implications on flood quantile estimates. To alleviate this problem, focus of NP flood frequency analysis has been on development of new kernel density estimators (kdes). Another issue in FFA is that information on the whole hydrograph (e.g., time to the peak flow, volume of the flood flow and duration of the flood event) is needed, in addition to peak flow for certain applications. An option is to perform frequency analysis on each of the variables independently. However, these variables are not independent, and hence there is a need to perform multivariate analysis to construct multivariate PDFs and use the corresponding cumulative distribution functions (CDFs) to arrive at estimates of characteristics of design flood hydrograph. In this perspective, recent focus of flood frequency analysis studies has been on development of methods to derive joint distributions of flood hydrograph related variables in a nonparametric setting. Further, in real world scenario, it is often necessary to estimate design flood quantiles at target locations that have limited or no data. Regional Flood Frequency analysis (RFFA) procedures have been developed for use in such situations. These procedures involve use of a regionalization procedure for identification of a homogeneous group of watersheds that are similar to watershed of the target site in terms of flood response. Subsequently regional frequency analysis (RFA) is performed, wherein the information pooled from the group (region) forms basis for frequency analysis to construct a CDF (growth curve) that is…