Return Period of Characteristic Discharges from the Comparison between Partial Duration and Annual Series, Application to the Walloon Rivers (Belgium)

The determination of the return period of frequent discharges requires the definition of flood peak thresholds. Unlike daily data, the volume of data to be processed with the generalization of hourly data loggers or even with an even finer temporal resolution quickly becomes too large to be managed by hand. We therefore propose an algorithm that automatically extracts flood characteristics to compute partial series return periods based on hourly series of flow rates. Thresholds are defined through robust analysis of field observation-independent data to obtain five independent flood peaks per... Mehr ...