Handling non-stationary flood frequency analysis using TL-moments approach for estimation parameter

Abstract

Non-stationary flood frequency analysis (NFFA) plays an important role in addressing the issue of the stationary assumption (independent and identically distributed flood series) that is no longer valid in infrastructure-designed methods. This confirms the necessity of developing new statistical models in order to identify the change of probability functions over time and obtain a consistent flood estimation method in NFFA. The method of Trimmed L-moments (TL-moments) with time covariate is confronted with the L-moment method for the stationary and non-stationary generalized extreme value (GEV) models. The aims of the study are to investigate the behavior of the proposed TL-moments method in the presence of NFFA and applying the method along with GEV distribution. Comparisons of the methods are made by Monte Carlo simulations and bootstrap-based method. The simulation study showed the better performance of most levels of TL-moments method, which is TL(η,0), (η = 2, 3, 4) than the L-moment method for all models (GEV1, GEV2, and GEV3). The TL-moment method provides more efficient quantile estimates than other methods in flood quantiles estimated at higher return periods. Thus, the TL-moments method can produce better estimation results since the L-moment eliminates lowest value and gives more weight to the largest value which provides important information.