Concept of Equivalent Reliability for Estimating the Design Flood under Non-stationary Conditions

Yiming Hu, Zhongmin Liang (), Vijay P. Singh, Xuebin Zhang, Jun Wang, Binquan Li and Huimin Wang
Additional contact information
Yiming Hu: Hohai University
Zhongmin Liang: Hohai University
Vijay P. Singh: Texas A&M University
Xuebin Zhang: Climate Research Division, Environment Canada
Jun Wang: Hohai University
Binquan Li: Hohai University
Huimin Wang: Hohai University

Water Resources Management: An International Journal, Published for the European Water Resources Association (EWRA), 2018, vol. 32, issue 3, No 11, 997-1011

Abstract: Abstract Stationary hydrological frequency analysis (SHFA) has been commonly employed for estimating the design flood in most countries. Fundamental to applying SHFA is the assumption that the data series is stationary. In theory it is not applicable if the series is non-stationary. In this paper, we propose a concept of Equivalent Reliability (ER) to estimate the design flood under non-stationary conditions, which considers the impact of design life period of an engineering on design flood. ER implies that regardless of environmental changes, the design reliability of engineering under non-stationary conditions should be identical with the planned design reliability specified at the stage of the engineering planning. ER is expected to solve two key questions: (i) to estimate the design flood with a given return period for an engineering to be constructed, and (ii) to adjust the original design flood of an already constructed engineering to obtain a new design flood for making the engineering adapt to the changing conditions. Two experiments are provided to demonstrate how to employ ER to solve the above two questions. In addition, an example of annual peak flow series was also used to illustrate ER. Results show that the design life poses a considerable impact on the estimation of design flood and the uncertainty of parameter estimations leads to a non-negligible uncertainty on the estimation of design flood. Overall, ER can be a potential method for estimation of design flood under non-stationary conditions.

Keywords: Non-stationarity; Design flood; Equivalent reliability; Varying-parameter probability distribution model (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s11269-017-1851-y Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:waterr:v:32:y:2018:i:3:d:10.1007_s11269-017-1851-y

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/11269

DOI: 10.1007/s11269-017-1851-y

Access Statistics for this article

Water Resources Management: An International Journal, Published for the European Water Resources Association (EWRA) is currently edited by G. Tsakiris

More articles in Water Resources Management: An International Journal, Published for the European Water Resources Association (EWRA) from Springer, European Water Resources Association (EWRA)
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().