Regional flood frequency analysis for the Gan-Ming River basin in China》.pdf

Journal of Hydrology 296 (2004) 98–117 /locate/jhydrol Regional flood frequency analysis for the Gan-Ming River basin in China a b, * Zhang Jingyi , M.J. Hall aDepartment of Hydrology and Water Resources, Hohai University, Nanjing City, China b UNESCO-IHE Institute for Water Education, P.O. Box 3015, 2601 DA Delft, The Netherlands Received 28 November 2002; revised 7 February 2004; accepted 19 March 2004 Abstract A regionalised relationship to estimate flood magnitudes for ungauged and poorly gauged catchments can be established using regional flood frequency analysis. The geographical approach (Residuals method), Ward’s cluster method, the Fuzzy c-means method and a Kohonen neural network were applied to 86 sites in the Gan River Basin of Jiangxi Province and the Ming River Basin of Fujian Province in the southeast of China to delineate homogeneous regions based on site characteristics. Similar groupings of sites into sub-regions were obtained from all but the Residuals method. Since the Kohonen neural network can be employed to identify the number of sub-regions as well as the allocation of sites to sub-regions, this method is to be preferred over Ward’s method and the Fuzzy c-means approach. For each sub-region, growth curves must be constructed and the value of an index flood must be related to catchment characteristics. The regional L-moment algorithm may be used to advantage both to identify an appropriate underlying frequency distribution and to construct sub-regional growth curves. However, the membership lev