Abstract
Flood hazard mapping and the design of many water infrastructures are
commonly based on the use of a single hydrologic variable, the design
instantaneous peak flow. However, the entire flood hydrograph (or at
least the flood volume) is needed in many circumstances, including the
evaluation of potential risks in dam safety analysis, the design of
detention basins, the application of inundation methods or of river
levee failure. While many efforts have been made in the last decades to
improve the peak flow estimation in a generic section of a river
network, procedures for the systematic estimation of flood volumes in
ungauged sections over large regions are not consolidated yet. In this
paper, the estimation of the flood volumes in ungauged basins is
developed, based on the Flood Reduction Function (FRF), a parsimonious
representation of the flood hydrograph structure. The FRF is a
volume-duration relationship that allows to easily extract flood
hydrographs based on few parameters, that exhibit marked regularity.
Based on data from 87 basins (763 station-years of flood hydrographs) in
the Northwest Italy, a two-parameter FRF has been considered to build a
regionalized estimation procedure. The estimation of FRF parameters in
ungauged basins has been obtained with different procedures. Results
suggest that the multiple linear regression model can be an effective
method to estimate the FRF in ungauged basins, producing nearly unbiased
predictions and design hydrographs which reasonably resemble the
observed ones.