Abstract
![CDATA[Design floods are needed to design safe and adequate infrastructure such as bridges, levees and dams. The estimation of design floods is generally performed by at-site flood frequency analysis (FFA) when adequate historical streamflow data is available at the site of interest. The 3rd edition of Australian Rainfall & Runoff (ARR) 1987 recommended the use of the log-Pearson type 3 (LP 3) distribution to estimate design floods for all Australian catchments including South West Western Australia. The 4th edition of ARR no longer prescribes a particular probability distribution for FFA in Australia. In this study six different probability distributions are used to assess which probability distribution could be recommended when performing FFA for catchments located in South West Western Australia. The distributions that are assessed in this study are: normal distribution, log-normal (LN) distribution, LP3 distribution, generalised extreme value (GEV) distribution, extreme value type 1 (EV1) distribution and generalized Pareto (GP) distribution. Use of the software package TUFLOW Flike, recommended in the 4th edition of ARR, is made to fit the LN, LP3, GEV, EV1 & GP distributions, while the R software package is used to fit the normal distribution. Goodness of fit testing is performed to assist in the ranking of the various distributions for the selected catchments. From this study of the six distributions on 103 catchments located in South West Western Australia we find that the GEV distribution provides the best estimation of design floods from FFA. However, some catchments in South West Western Australia do not follow the GEV distribution where other distribution should be applied. This study highlights the difficulties in recommending a single probability distribution for FFA in a given region.]]
| Original language | English |
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| Title of host publication | Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Water and Environmental Engineering (ICWEE2017), 20-22 November 2017, Sydney, Australia |
| Publisher | Science, Technology and Management Crest Australia |
| Pages | 108-112 |
| Number of pages | 5 |
| ISBN (Print) | 9780648014744 |
| Publication status | Published - 2017 |
| Event | International Conference on Water and Environmental Engineering - Duration: 20 Nov 2017 → … |
Conference
| Conference | International Conference on Water and Environmental Engineering |
|---|---|
| Period | 20/11/17 → … |
Keywords
- floods
- watersheds
- hydrologic models
- flood frequency analysis
- Western Australia