Evaluation of Mixed-Population Flood-Frequency Analysis

Abstract

A mixed population of flood flows was shown to cause quality-of-fit problems if a single-population flood-frequency distribution was used to describe the flood data. The three populations in this mix were “ordinary,” tropical cyclone, and ice-jam–release floods. Parametric descriptions of the single and separated flood populations were evaluated using probability-plot correlation-coefficient tests. These tests quantified how well the flood-probability distributions agreed with plotting-position descriptions of the data and quantified the differences due to the mixed-population analysis. High outliers caused the high skewness found in the single-population analyses. The tropical cyclone component was underestimated by single-population analyses at gauging stations in Massachusetts that had little data.