On seasonal approach to flood frequency modelling. Part II: flood frequency analysis of Polish rivers

Abstract

Abstract The annual peak flow series of Polish rivers are mixtures of summer and winter flows. As Part II of a sequence of two papers, practical aspects of applicability of seasonal approach to flood frequency analysis (FFA) of Polish rivers are discussed. Taking A Two‐Component Extreme Value ( TCEV 1) model as an example it was shown in the first part that regardless of estimation method, the seasonal approach can give profit in terms of upper quantile estimation accuracy that rises with the return period of the quantile and is the greatest for no seasonal variation. In this part, an assessment of annual maxima (AM) versus seasonal maxima (SM) approach to FFA was carried out with respect to seasonal and annual peak flow series of 38 Polish gauging stations. First, the assumption of mutual independence of the seasonal maxima has been tested. The smoothness of SM and AM empirical probability distribution functions was analysed and compared. The TCEV 1 model with seasonally estimated parameters was found to be not appropriate for most Polish data as it considerably underrates the skewness of AM distributions and upper quantile values as well. Consequently, the discrepancies between the SM and AM estimates of TCEV 1 are observed. Taking SM and TCEV 1 distribution, the dominating season in AM series was confronted with predominant season for extreme floods. The key argument for presumptive superiority of SM approach that SM samples are more statistically homogeneous than AM samples has not been confirmed by the data. An analysis of fitness to SM and AM of Polish datasets made for seven distributions pointed to Pearson (3) distribution as the best for AM and Summer Maxima, whereas it was impossible to select a single best model for winter samples. In the multi‐model approach to FFA, the tree functions, i.e., Pe(3), CD3 and LN3, should be involved for both SM and AM. As the case study, Warsaw gauge on the Vistula River was selected. While most of AM elements are here from winter season, the prevailing majority of extreme annual floods are the summer maxima. The upper quantile estimates got by means of classical annual and two‐season methods happen to be fairly close; what's more they are nearly equal to the quantiles calculated just for the season of dominating extreme floods. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.