Author(s): Jingyi Zhang
Linked Author(s):
Keywords: Regional flood frequency analysis; Principal component analysis; Fuzzy c-means method; Weighted fuzzy c-means method; Heterogenous test; L-moments
Abstract: Estimation of flooding potential is often required for catchments with insufficient or non-existent hydrometric information. In such circumstances, regional flood frequency analysis or regionalisation can be employed with available information from similar catchments. The process of regionalisation includes the identification of catchments that collectively compose a homogeneous region and the formulation of a scheme for that region to estimate floods by using catchment characteristics. The identification of catchments may be regarded as an example of the wider problem of classification of data sets. The principal component analysis, the fuzzy c-means method and weighted fuzzy c-means method were applied for data set of 86 stations from Gan-Ming river basin in Jiangxi and Fujian provinces of China and it was found that the stations could be divided into three groups. A test of heterogeneity based on L-moments should therefore be prerequisite of any regional flood frequencies to check whether a proposed sub-region is homogeneity or not.
Year: 2002