Analysis and Simulation of Three-Component Floods in the Ohio River Basin

Abstract

Flood series including three components, namely, the occurrence time, the discharge volume, and the flood duration, are formed from observed daily streamflows. The intensity function describing the flood occurrence rate is derived assuming the nonhomogeneous Poisson process. A fitted equation is applied to the estimated intensities by the least squares method. The Thinning method based on controlled deletion of points in a poisson process uses the fitted intensity function to generate the flood occurrence times which are expressed by a sequence of time intervals. The procedure of the marked point process is introduced to link the flood duration and the discharge volume, which are modeled, respectively, by exponential distributions, of the flood occurrence time. Therefore the simulated result consists of three-component flood series including the occurrence time, the flood duration and the discharge volume, which can be used for environmental pollution protection and flood-control purposes. The statistical comparisons made between the generated and the observed series are reasonably agreeable.