Nonstationary multi-site design flood estimation and application to design flood regional composition analysis

Impacts of climate change and human activities may lead to changes in the spatiotemporal composition of the design flood as well as its size. Previous studies mainly focused on changes in design flood size, while there has been relatively little research on changes in its regional composition. In this study, a nonstationary multi-site design flood estimation method is developed, which is useful for the design flood regional composition analysis under nonstationary conditions. Dynamic copula models are first constructed to analyze the change in the joint distribution of the nonstationary multi-site flood variables with the consideration of the nonstationarity of the marginal distribution and copula structure parameters. Then the design flood combinations in multi-site for a specified design standard are calculated by comprehensively applying the equivalent reliability method, the expectation conditional and the most-likely conditional combination strategies, which considers the future precipitation change and design lifespan length impacts on the design flood. Finally, the uncertainty of the multi-site design flood estimation caused by the model parameters uncertainty is evaluated. A case study, based on the annual maximum 7-day (AM7) flood volume in the Yichang (YC) and Cuntan (CT) sites, is conducted to illustrate this method. Results show that flood quantiles in the YC and CT sites exhibit an increasing trend as the precipitation projections will increase in the future, but the flood quantiles in the YC site are less compared to the historical period because of the huge regulation and storage effect of the Three Gorges Reservoir. In addition, the design flood combination in the CT and YC sites are calculated and the CT design floods from the expectation combination strategy are bigger than those provided by the most-likely combination strategy.