HESS Hydrology and Earth System Sciences HESS Hydrol. Earth Syst. Sci. 1607-7938 Copernicus Publications Göttingen, Germany 10.5194/hess-14-2495-2010 Design flood hydrographs from the relationship between flood peak and volume Mediero L. 1 Jiménez-Álvarez A. 2 Garrote L. 1 Department of Civil Engineering: Hydraulics and Energetics, Technical University of Madrid, Spain Centre for Hydrographic Studies of CEDEX, Madrid, Spain 10 12 2010 14 12 2495 2505 Copyright: © 2010 L. Mediero et al. 2010 This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this licence, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ This article is available from https://hess.copernicus.org/articles/14/2495/2010/hess-14-2495-2010.html The full text article is available as a PDF file from https://hess.copernicus.org/articles/14/2495/2010/hess-14-2495-2010.pdf

Hydrological frequency analyses are usually focused on flood peaks. Flood volumes and durations have not been studied as extensively, although there are many practical situations, such as when designing a dam, in which the full hydrograph is of interest. A flood hydrograph may be described by a multivariate function of the peak, volume and duration. Most standard bivariate and trivariate functions do not produce univariate three-parameter functions as marginal distributions, however, three-parameter functions are required to fit highly skewed data, such as flood peak and flood volume series. In this paper, the relationship between flood peak and hydrograph volume is analysed to overcome this problem. A Monte Carlo experiment was conducted to generate an ensemble of hydrographs that maintain the statistical properties of marginal distributions of the peaks, volumes and durations. This ensemble can be applied to determine the Design Flood Hydrograph (DFH) for a reservoir, which is not a unique hydrograph, but rather a curve in the peak-volume space. All hydrographs on that curve have the same return period, which can be understood as the inverse of the probability to exceed a certain water level in the reservoir in any given year. The procedure can also be applied to design the length of the spillway crest in terms of the risk of exceeding a given water level in the reservoir.

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