Design floods considering the epistemic uncertainty

Abstract

The Design Flood (DF) concept is an essential tool in designing hydraulic works, defining reservoir operation programs, and identifying reliable flood hazard maps. The purpose of this paper is to present a methodology for deriving a Design Flood hydrograph considering the epistemic uncer-tainty. Several appropriately identified statistical distributions allow for the acceptable approximation of the frequent values of maximum discharges or flood volumes, and display a significant spread for their medium/low Probabilities of Exceedance (PE). The referred scattering, as a consequence of epistemic uncertainty, defines an area of uncertainty for both recorded data and extrapolated values. In considering the upper and lower values of the uncertainty intervals as limits for maximum discharges and flood volumes, and by further combining them compatibly, a set of DFs as completely defined hydrographs with different shapes result for each PE. The herein proposed procedure defines both uni-modal and multi-modal DFs. Subsequently, such DFs help water managers in examining and establishing tailored approaches for a variety of input hydrographs, which might be typically generated in river basins.