Reed, D.W. 1993b. Analysis of rainfall extremes. Paper to Université Européene d’Eté, Crues torrentielles et inondations: montagne et régions méditérranéennes, La Seu d’Urgell, Espagne, September 1993, 10pp.
The generalization of rainfall depth-duration-frequency relations is required for conventional flood design by rainfall-runoff methods. It is also needed to answer, or help answer, the question: "How rare was that storm/flood/landslide?".
The note begins by discussing data availability and its implications. Techniques based on L-moments (Hosking, 1990) are then summarized. These provide a simple but effective method of exploring the statistical characteristics of rainfall extremes.
The next section describes a method of pooling annual maximum depths from a network of sites and durations, to obtain a consistent generalization of rainfall depth-duration-frequency for a locality. Reference is made, in Section V, to the estimation of inter-site and inter-duration dependence in rainfall extremes, and, in Section VI, to some applications that generalization of dependence models permits. Some recommendations follow.