TY  - JOUR
A1  - Lescesen, Igor
A1  - Sraj, Mojca
A1  - Basarin, Biljana
A1  - Pavic, Dragoslav
A1  - Mesaros, Minucer
A1  - Mudelsee, Manfred
T1  - Regional flood frequency analysis of the sava river in south-eastern Europe
JF  - Sustainability
N2  - Regional flood frequency analysis (RFFA) is a powerful method for interrogating hydrological series since it combines observational time series from several sites within a region to estimate risk-relevant statistical parameters with higher accuracy than from single-site series. Since RFFA extreme value estimates depend on the shape of the selected distribution of the data-generating stochastic process, there is need for a suitable goodness-of-distributional-fit measure in order to optimally utilize given data. Here we present a novel, least-squares-based measure to select the optimal fit from a set of five distributions, namely Generalized Extreme Value (GEV), Generalized Logistic, Gumbel, Log-Normal Type III and Log-Pearson Type III. The fit metric is applied to annual maximum discharge series from six hydrological stations along the Sava River in South-eastern Europe, spanning the years 1961 to 2020. Results reveal that (1) the Sava River basin can be assessed as hydrologically homogeneous and (2) the GEV distribution provides typically the best fit. We offer hydrological-meteorological insights into the differences among the six stations. For the period studied, almost all stations exhibit statistically insignificant trends, which renders the conclusions about flood risk as relevant for hydrological sciences and the design of regional flood protection infrastructure.
KW  - discharge time series
KW  - flood risk analysis
KW  - Generalized Extreme Value distribution
KW  - L-moments estimation
KW  - regional flood frequency analysis
KW  - Sava River
Y1  - 2022
U6  - https://doi.org/10.3390/su14159282
SN  - 2071-1050
VL  - 14
IS  - 15
PB  - MDPI
CY  - Basel
ER  -