Reducing uncertainty of design floods of two-component mixture distributions by utilizing flood timescale to classify flood types in seasonally snow covered region

Abstract

The conventional flood frequency analysis typically assumes the annual maximum flood series (AMFS) result from a homogeneous flood population. However, actually AMFS are frequently generated by distinct flood generation mechanisms (FGMs), which are controlled by the interaction between different meteorological triggers (e.g., thunderstorms, typhoon, snowmelt) and properties of underlying surface (e.g., antecedent soil moisture and land-cover types). To consider the possibility of two FGMs in flood frequency analysis, researchers often use the two-component mixture distributions (TCMD) without explicitly linking each component distribution to a particular FGM. To improve the mixture distribution modeling in seasonally snow covered regions, an index called flood timescale (FT), defined as the ratio of the flood volume to peak value and chosen to reflect the relevant FGM, is employed to classify each flood into one of two types, i.e., the snowmelt-induced long-duration floods and the rainfall-induced short-duration floods, thus identifying the weighting coefficient of each component distribution beforehand. In applying the FT-based TCMD to model the AMFS of 34 watersheds in Norway, ten types of mixture distributions are considered. The design floods and associated confidence intervals are calculated using parametric bootstrap method. The results indicate that the FT-based TCMD model reduces the uncertainty in the estimation of design floods for high return periods by up to 40% with respect to the traditional TCMD. The improved predictive ability of the FT-based TCMD model is attributed to its explicit recognition of distinct generation mechanisms of floods, thereby being able to identify the weighting coefficient and FGM of each component distribution without optimization.