Multivariate hydrologic design methods under nonstationary conditions and application to engineering practice

Jiang, Cong; Xiong, Lihua; Yan, Lei; Dong, Jianfan; Xu, Chong-Yu

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-23-1683-2019

Articles | Volume 23, issue 3

https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-23-1683-2019

© Author(s) 2019. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-23-1683-2019

© Author(s) 2019. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 23, issue 3

Research article

|

22 Mar 2019

Research article |

| 22 Mar 2019

Multivariate hydrologic design methods under nonstationary conditions and application to engineering practice

Cong Jiang, Lihua Xiong, Lei Yan, Jianfan Dong, and Chong-Yu Xu

Download

Final revised paper (published on 22 Mar 2019)
Preprint (discussion started on 12 Jul 2018)

Interactive discussion

Status: closed

AC: Author comment | RC: Referee comment | SC: Short comment | EC: Editor comment

- Printer-friendly version

- Supplement

RC1: 'Multivariate hydrologic design methods under nonstationary conditions and application to engineering practice', Anonymous Referee #1, 25 Jul 2018
- AC1: 'Rely to Referee #1', Cong Jiang, 22 Oct 2018
- AC3: 'Reply to Referee #1(corrected version)', Cong Jiang, 22 Oct 2018
RC2: 'Review', Anonymous Referee #2, 06 Oct 2018
- AC4: 'Reply to Referee #2 (corrected version)', Cong Jiang, 22 Oct 2018
RC3: 'Review of “Multivariate hydrologic design methods under nonstationary conditions and application to engineering practice”.', Anonymous Referee #3, 11 Oct 2018
- AC5: 'Reply to referee # 3', Cong Jiang, 22 Oct 2018
AC2: 'Rely to Referee #2', Cong Jiang, 22 Oct 2018

Peer-review completion

AR: Author's response | RR: Referee report | ED: Editor decision

ED: Reconsider after major revisions (further review by editor and referees) (08 Nov 2018) by Carlo De Michele

AR by Cong Jiang on behalf of the Authors (19 Nov 2018) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Referee Nomination & Report Request started (25 Nov 2018) by Carlo De Michele

RR by Anonymous Referee #1 (23 Dec 2018)

RR by Feifei Zheng (14 Jan 2019)

Suggestions for revision or reasons for rejection

Comments for the paper “Multivariate hydrologic design methods under nonstationary conditions and application to engineering practice”

Overall, this paper is well written and is of great interest to the flooding research community. Considering the floods in the context of multiple variables is important as such cases have been often observed in practice. I would like to invite the authors to address the following comments before this paper can be accepted.

1: While the paper focuses on the multivariate, it actually simplifies it through decomposing the multivariate into many bivariate cases. I understand this is in the consideration for parameter estimation. However, this also may result in possible bias in the results. I suggest the authors to give some discussions on this.

2: Can the authors please present some statistical figures to pair the Q and V3 (just use the original data to see whether there is a strong correlation). I think these plots would be very helpful.

3: “In reality, all parameters of the flood distribution can be nonstationary, but this paper only considered nonstationarity of the location parameter (referring to the first moment or mean of the flood series).” This is an important assumption that needs more explanation. Does this assumption will significant affect the results? Have previous studies made similar assumptions?
4: Why annual maximum daily discharge, annual maximum 3-day flood volume, annual maximum 7-day flood volume, and annual maximum 15-day flood volume are used as the multivariate flood series. What are the physical significances of selecting such variables? Do they link to the catchment properties?

5: What does ARR mean in the Abstract? Should give the full name as it appeals at the first time.
6: Authors have mentioned two remarks in the end of the paper, of which the first one is related to the observations that are used for the flooding risk analysis. I totally agree with the authors in that the data with sufficient length is critical to enable the statistical analysis, which has been systematically analyzed in Zheng et al. (2018). I suggest the authors to have a look at this paper that focus on the data collecting methods for rainfall and floods.

Zheng, F., Tao, R., Maier, H. R., See, L., Savic, D., Zhang, T., et al. (2018). Crowdsourcing methods for data collection in geophysics: State of the art, issues, and future directions. Reviews of Geophysics, 56. https://doi.org/10.1029/2018RG000616.

Hide

ED: Publish subject to minor revisions (review by editor) (05 Feb 2019) by Carlo De Michele

AR by Cong Jiang on behalf of the Authors (14 Feb 2019) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Publish subject to technical corrections (09 Mar 2019) by Carlo De Michele

AR by Cong Jiang on behalf of the Authors (11 Mar 2019) Author's response Manuscript

Short summary

We present the methods addressing the multivariate hydrologic design applied to the engineering practice under nonstationary conditions. A dynamic C-vine copula allowing for both time-varying marginal distributions and a time-varying dependence structure is developed to capture the nonstationarities of multivariate flood distribution. Then, the multivariate hydrologic design under nonstationary conditions is estimated through specifying the design criterion by average annual reliability.