Influence of infiltration and soil storage capacity on the skewness of the annual maximum flood peaks in a theoretically derived distribution

Abstract

Understanding the spatial variability of key pa-rameters of flood probability distributions represents a strat-egy to provide insights on hydrologie similarity and building probabilistic models able to reduce the uncertainty in flood prediction in ungauged basins. In this work, we exploited the theoretically derived distribution of floods model TCIF (Two Component Iacobellis and Fiorentino model; Gioia et al., 2008), based on two different threshold mechanisms as-sociated to ordinary and extraordinary events. The model is based on the hypotheses that ordinary floods are generally due to rainfall events exceeding a constant infiltration rate in a small source area, while the so-called outlier events respon-sible for the high skewness of flood distributions are trig-gered when severe rainfalls exceed a storage threshold over a large portion of the basin. Within this scheme, a sensitivity analysis was performed with respect to climatic and geomor-phologie parameters in order to analyze the effects on the skewness coefficient and provide insights in catchment clas-sification and process conceptualization. The analysis was conducted to investigate the influence on flood distribution of physical factors such as rainfall intensity, basin area, and particular focus on soil behavior. © Author(s) 2012. CC Attribution 3.0 License.