Delineation of homogenous regions using hydrological variables predicted by projection pursuit regression

This study investigates the utilization of hydrological information in regional flood frequency analysis (RFFA) to enforce desired properties for a group of gauged stations. Neighbourhoods are particular types of regions that are centred on target locations. A challenge for using neighbourhoods in R...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Hydrology and earth system sciences 2016-11, Vol.20 (12), p.4717-4729
Main Authors: Durocher, Martin, Chebana, Fateh, Ouarda, Taha B. M. J
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Analysis
Case studies
Correlation analysis
Estimates
Flood frequency
Flood frequency analysis
Floods
Forecasting
Frequency analysis
Homogeneity
Hydrology
Information processing
Neighborhoods
Properties
Random variables
Regional analysis
Regions
Regression analysis
Regression models
River discharge
Stations
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Summary:This study investigates the utilization of hydrological information in regional flood frequency analysis (RFFA) to enforce desired properties for a group of gauged stations. Neighbourhoods are particular types of regions that are centred on target locations. A challenge for using neighbourhoods in RFFA is that hydrological information is not available at target locations and cannot be completely replaced by the available physiographical information. Instead of using the available physiographic characteristics to define the centre of a target location, this study proposes to introduce estimates of reference hydrological variables to ensure a better homogeneity. These reference variables represent nonlinear relations with the site characteristics obtained by projection pursuit regression, a nonparametric regression method. The resulting neighbourhoods are investigated in combination with commonly used regional models: the index-flood model and regression-based models. The complete approach is illustrated in a real-world case study with gauged sites from the southern part of the province of Québec, Canada, and is compared with the traditional approaches such as region of influence and canonical correlation analysis. The evaluation focuses on the neighbourhood properties as well as prediction performances, with special attention devoted to problematic stations. Results show clear improvements in neighbourhood definitions and quantile estimates.
ISSN:1607-7938
1027-5606
1607-7938
DOI:10.5194/hess-20-4717-2016