Scaling behaviour of regional floods in New South Wales Australia

![CDATA[Regional flood frequency analysis such as the index flood method is often used in hydrology to estimate design floods in ungauged catchments. The index flood method is based on simple scaling assumption. In this paper, the scaling behaviour of regional floods in New South Wales Australia is investigated. The results show that the log-log relationships between moments of annual maximum flood series and the catchment areas are linear. Similarly, a linear relationship between flood quantiles and catchment areas is identified in that the scaling exponent (slope of the regression line) does not change appreciably with the average recurrence intervals of the flood quantiles. These results indicate that the annual maximum floods in NSW satisfy a simple scaling assumption, which implies that the index flood method would be applicable to NSW regional annual maximum flood data.]]