Flood Frequency Analysis of the Waimakariri River
Robert Ware and Frank Lad
View Report [PDF - 520 KB]
Abstract
Different approaches to flood frequency analysis are investigated, with particular emphasis on estimating extreme hydrological events for a site, or group of sites. Frequentist approaches to flood estimation are examined. At-site and regional estimates are studied, and their accuracy and precision compared.
Flood exceedance quantiles are assessed using updated mixture mass functions as sequential forecasting distributions. These sequential forecasts are scored using three different scoring rules for distributions: the quadratic, logarithmic and spherical.
Both the frequentist methods and the digital forecasting procedures are applied to date collected from the Waimakariri River in Canterbury, New Zealand. Finally, we compare the appropriateness of the frequentist and digital methods. It is found that the mixture distributions computed by the discrete digital method provide much more uniform forecasts across an array of proposed distribution families than do the frequentist forecasting methods.
Back to Research Reports
