Abstract
Abstract. The design of effective coastal protections requires an adequate estimation of the annual occurrence probability of rare events associated with a return period up to 103 years. Regional frequency analysis (RFA) has been proven to be an applicable way to estimate extreme events by sorting regional data into large and spatially distributed datasets. Nowadays, historical data are available to provide new insight on past event estimation. The utilisation of historical information would increase the precision and the reliability of regional extreme's quantile estimation. However, historical data are from significant extreme events that are not recorded by tide gauge. They usually look like isolated data and they are different from continuous data from systematic measurements of tide gauges. This makes the definition of the duration of our observations period complicated. However, the duration of the observation period is crucial for the frequency estimation of extreme occurrences. For this reason, we introduced here the concept of “credible duration”. The proposed RFA method (hereinafter referenced as FAB, from the name of the authors) allows the use of historical data together with systematic data, which is a result of the use of the credible duration concept.
Highlights
Flood risk is a noteworthy threat for anthropic and industrial settlement along the coast
Coastal defence constructions have to withstand extreme events. In this context, a statistical estimation of extreme marine variables occurrence probability is necessary. These variables associated with high return periods are estimated by statistical methods linked to the extreme value theory (EVT) (Fréchet, 1928; Gnedenko, 1943; Gumbel, 1958; Picklands, 1975; Coles, 2001)
We investigate the use of historical data in Regional frequency analysis (RFA) of systematic measurements of skew surge levels
Summary
Flood risk is a noteworthy threat for anthropic and industrial settlement along the coast. We state that this advantage allows us to supplant the concept of a perception threshold providing by a credible estimation of the unknown historical duration used to estimate the extreme quantiles Thanks to this new concept of duration in this study, the FAB methodology is developed in order to use historical data and systematic data together in a RFA of extreme events. This methodology, described in detail, is applied to the extreme skew surges given by 71 tide gauges located on the British, French and Spanish coasts and 14 historical collected skew surges is shown in Sect.
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