• Water Engineering Research
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• v.1 no.1
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• pp.11-23
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• 2000

Regional flood frequency analysis has been developed by employing the nearby site's information to improve a precision in estimating flood quantiles at the site of interest. In this paper, single site and regional flood frequency analyses were compared based of the 2-parameter Weibull model. For regional analysis, two approaches were employed. The First one is to use the asymptotic variances of the quantile estimators derived based of the assumption that all sites including the site of interest are independent each other. This approach may give the maximum regional gain due to the spatial independence assumption among sites. The second one in Hosking's regional L-moment algorithm. These methods were applied to annual flood data. As the results, both methods generally showed the regional gain at the site of interest depending on grouping the sites as homogeneous. And asymptotic formula generally shows smaller variance than those from Hosking's algorithm. If the shape parameter of the site of interest from single site analysis is quite different from that from regional analysis then Hosking's results might be better than the asymptotic ones because the formula was derived based on the assumption that all sites have the same regional shape parameter. Furthermore, in such a case, regional analysis might be worse than single site analysis in the sense of precision of flood quantile estimation. Even though the selected sites may satisfy Hosking's criteria, regional analysis may not give a regional gain for specific and nonexceedance probabilities.