Determination of N‑year Design Precipitation in the Czech Republic by Annual Maximum Series Method

Abstract

The sum of design precipitation of a selected repetition period, provided that it is evenly distributed over the river basin area, is a basic input for the calculation of the direct outflow volume by the curve number method. It is necessary to determine the design precipitation for each location using the statistical methods and the longest available data series on daily precipitation sums, or more specifically their annual maximums. This paper deals with the determination of design precipitation from data of eight stations of the Czech Hydrometeorological Institute for the period 1961–2013. From a series of annual maximum values of daily precipitation sums, N‑year design precipitations were calculated using two methods (Gumbel and generalized extreme value distributions). The conformity of both models with empirical distribution of values was statistically tested to evaluate which of the models gave more accurate results. In these cases, it was more appropriate to use the generalized extreme value distribution. Finally, the newly calculated characteristics were compared with the design values used by Šamaj et al. (1985), where significant differences were found.

Keywords

• Gumbel distribution
• generalized extreme value distribution (GEV)
• curve number method (CN)
• direct outflow volume
• design precipitation
• annual maximum series (AMS)