Beyond Simple Trend Tests: Detecting Significant Changes in Design‐Flood Quantiles

Abstract

Abstract Changes in annual maximum flood (AMF), which are usually detected using simple trend tests (e.g., Mann‐Kendall test (MKT)), are expected to change design‐flood estimates. We propose an alternate framework to detect significant changes in design‐flood between two periods and evaluate it for synthetically generated AMF from the Log‐Pearson Type‐3 (LP3) distribution due to changes in moments associated with flood distribution. Synthetic experiments show MKT does not consider changes in all three moments of the LP3 distribution and incorrectly detects changes in design‐flood. We applied the framework on 31 river basins spread across the United States. Statistically significant changes in design‐flood quantiles were observed even without a significant trend in AMF and basins with statistically significant trend did not necessarily exhibit statistically significant changes in design‐flood. We recommend application of the framework for evaluating changes in design‐flood estimates considering changes in all the moments as opposed to simple trend tests.

Keywords

• design‐flood estimation
• trend tests
• climate change
• water‐infrastructure safety
• non‐stationary flood