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Aquatic Procedia 4 (2015) 427 434

INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON WATER RESOURCES, COASTAL AND OCEAN

ENGINEERING (ICWRCOE 2015)

Flood Frequency Analysis of Tel Basin of Mahanadi River

System, India using Annual Maximum and POT Flood Data
Nibedita Guru a, Ramakar Jhab
a
Research Scholar, Civil Engineering, NIT Rourkela, India, nibeditaguru149@gmail.com
b
Professor, Civil Engineering, NIT Rourkela, India, rjha34@gmail.com

Abstract

Flood frequency analysis indicates the catchment characteristics, water availability and possible extreme hydrological
conditions like floods and droughts at various locations of any river system. Such studies have been done in the past using long
term annual maximum flood series for early warning, preparedness, mitigation and reduction of any kind of disasters. In the
present study, Annual Maximum (AM) flood series and Peak over Threshold (POT) flood series were used to carry out flood
frequency analysis for Tel basin of Mahanadi river system, India. The POT values were considered based on (a) commonly
used standard practice and (b) flood values damaging the downstream areas and causing disaster in Mahanadi river system,
India. To recognize the anomalies in tail behavior of the flood frequency distribution and for selecting appropriate flood
frequency distributions, Quantile-Quantile plots (Q-Q plots) were used. The analysis was carried out for flood series data of two
gauging stations Kesinga (upstream) and Kantamal (downstream) of Tel basin, Mahanadi river system, India for the years
1972-2009. Fourteen different flood frequency distributions were tried for AM and POT flood series data for 31 years for
Kesinga and 38 years for Kantamal. The results obtained using Generalized Pareto (GP) distribution shows better results for
AM flood data series with all goodness of fit tests. However, for POT flood data series LogNormal (3P) distribution showed
best results followed by GP distributions with all goodness of fit test. The distributions most suitable for POT data sets are same
for the distribution being used globally for flood forecasting.
2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license
2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).
Peer-reviewunder
Peer-review under responsibility
responsibility of organizing
of organizing committee
committee of ICWRCOE
of ICWRCOE 2015 2015.
Keywords: Annual maximum series; Peak over threshold; flood frequency analysis; probability distribution; Q-Q plots

___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

* Nibedita Guru. Tel.: +919438055906.

E-mail address: nibeditaguru149@gmail.com

2214-241X 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).
Peer-review under responsibility of organizing committee of ICWRCOE 2015
doi:10.1016/j.aqpro.2015.02.057
428 Nibedita Guru and Ramakar Jha / Aquatic Procedia 4 (2015) 427 434

1. Introduction

High flow exceeding danger levels and entering in flood plains is the result of heavy or continuous rainfall
exceeding the absorptive capacity of soil, and the flow capacity of the streams. It causes widespread damage to
property and life in different parts of the catchment. Despite the fascinating achievements of science and
technology in the 21st century, floods and droughts continue to hit every generation of human beings, bringing
suffering, death, and material losses. The knowledge of magnitude-frequency relationships can be used in the
design of dams, spillway of dams, highway, bridges, culverts, water supply systems and flood control structures. In
the past, flood frequency analysis techniques were developed to relate the magnitude of floods with their frequency
of occurrences (Hosking and Wallis, 1997). Such studies have also been done to estimate flood based on catchment
characteristics and statistical analysis. It is understood that a minimum of 30-40 years of records are needed for
flood frequency analysis. If the length of records is too short, specifically on inadequate data situation, then
regional flood frequency curves together with at-site mean provides consistent estimates of floods. Some of the
studies carried out in the past are discussed below;

In the year 1868, OConnell performed one of the earliest studies on regional analyses of stream flows with simple
empirical formulas that attempted to connect discharge to drainage area. The approach was very simple and the
proposed formula was

(1)

Where = maximum discharge; A = drainage area; and C = coefficient related to the region. OConnell
selected a value of 0.5 for the exponent, considering the relationship between discharge and area as parabolic in the
absence of sufficient data.

The application of probability theory in flood estimation procedures was introduced by Fuller (1914) who
calculated floods of different return periods for catchments in the U.S. With nearly 50 years of additional data,
Fuller (1914) analyzed long records of dailyy fflows
l and peak flow particularly the data from the United States. He
related the average of the maximum floods ( ) to the drainage area with an exponent of 0.8

(2)

Hazen (1921) revised his own work and found some data sets plotted are as curved lines in log normal distribution.
He suggested to use a three-parameter distribution including skewness and plot it on logarithmic probability paper.
He made a note saying that The coefficient of skewness is subjected to the objection that there is a tendency for
its value to increase with the number of terms in the series. Foster (1924) introduced the Pearson type III (P3)
frequency distribution for describing the flood data. Gumbel (1941) brought the basis of analysis to a new level by
applying extreme value theory. Using the findings of Fisher and Tippett (1928), Gumbel (1941) introduced the
Extreme Value Type I distribution (EV1) to flood frequency analysis. Chow et.al (1988), related the magnitude of
such extreme events with their frequency of occurrence through the use of probability distributions. By fitting the
past observations to selected probability distributions, the probability of future high flow events can be predicted.
Cunnane (1988) reviewed twelve different methods of regional flood frequency analysis, including well known
methods such as the USWRC (U.S Water Resources Council) method , different variants of index flood methods,
Bayesian methods and the two-component extreme value (TCEV) method and he rated the index flood using a
regional algorithm based on PWMs as the best one. POT series are also denoted by some authors as Partial
Duration Series (PDS) because the flood peaks can be considered as the maximum flow values during hydrograph
 Nibedita Guru and Ramakar Jha / Aquatic Procedia 4 (2015) 427 434 429

periods of variable length. An important advantage of the POT series is that when the selected base value is
sufficiently high, small events that are not really floods are excluded. With the annual series, non-floods in dry

years may have an undue influence on shape of the distribution. In river flood applications, for instance, the U.S.
Water Resources Council (1976) considers consecutive peak floods as independent if the inter-event time exceeds
a critical time and if an inter-event discharge drops below a critical flow. The dependence between the POT or
PDS values is a function of the hydrological independence criterion used to divide the full series in its partial
durations or of the parameters (e.g. threshold level) used to define the particular POT values (e.g. Lang et al.,
1999). This paper discusses the method of choosing the threshold (the optimal number of upper extremes) in POT
analysis of samples and distributions from (a) commonly used standard practice and (b) flood values damaging the
downstream areas and causing disaster. An extreme value analysis methodology was used to recognize the
anomalies in tail behavior of the flood frequency distribution by means of Quantile-Quantile plots (Q-Q plots).

2. Study area and Data Collection

The Tel River originates in plain of Koraput district of Odisha, about 32 km to the west of Jorigam (Figure 1).It is
the second largest river of Orissa and is an important tributary of the Mahanadi River. The river traverses a total
length of 296 km to join the Mahanadi River on the right bank, 1.6 km below Sonepur. The total drainage area of
the Tel River is about 22,818 km2, in which 11960 km2 lies up to Kesinga and 19600 km2 lies up to Kantamal
gauging stations. The Tel sub-basin is bound between latitude 18 to 21 and between longitude 83 to 86
approximately. The normal annual rainfall of the entire Mahanadi basin is 1360 mm (16% coefficient of variation,
CV) of which about 6%, i.e.1170 mm, occurs during the monsoon season (15 % CV) from June to September.

Fig. 1.General Location Map of the Tel sub-basin

Daily discharge data for the years 1972-2009 were collected from Central Water Commission, Bhubaneswar
Figure 2 shows the daily mean discharge time series from 1972-2009 for Kantamal (downstream) and 1979 to
2009 for Kesinga (upstream) station of Tel basin. In addition, we fit a non-linear function to the time series, using
locally weighted scatterplot smoothing (LOWESS). The LOWESS results illustrate that the series does not have
major non-stationaries in frequency or variability.
430 Nibedita Guru and Ramakar Jha / Aquatic Procedia 4 (2015) 427 434

Fig. 2.Discharge time series including linear and non-linear trend of the Tel sub-basin, India

3. Materials and Method

Annual Maximum (AM) and Peak over Threshold (POT) flood series was used in the present study for fitting
different distributions. AM analysis is relatively straightforward; it employs only the largest event in each year,
regardless of whether the second (or third) event is greater than the largest events in other years. POT, also known
as partial distribution series (PDS), analysis tries to overcome these problems by using all events above a specified
threshold. This approach overcomes some of the problems with the AMS analysis, but it complicates the analysis
by introducing other issues: the definition of an appropriate threshold level and the selection of independent
exceedance of that threshold. In the present work, in order to model the flood series, Peak-Over-Threshold (POT)
approach, which includes all independent peaks above a truncation or threshold level, was employed. The POT
series may also be termed the partial duration series or basic stage series. The number of floods (K) generally will
be different to the number of years of record (N), and will depend on the selected threshold discharge. The US
Geological Survey (Dalrymple, 1960) recommended that K should equal 3N. If a probability distribution is to be
fitted to the POT series the desirable threshold discharge and average number of floods per year selected depend on
the type of distribution. It has been observed that the values below 5% probability of exceedance are affecting the
downstream regions and may create disaster. However, these values are much more than 3N to 5N, as suggested
earlier. Keeping all the criteria in view, the flood series having probability of exceedance less than 5% were
considered in the present work for both the gauging stations. The Quantile- Quantile plot is a graphical technique
for determining if two data sets come from populations with a common distribution. The methodology used
included subjecting data to quality control using mass curves and time series plots to check if there are any outliers,
selection of model type, fitting extreme value distributions, and determination of the return periods. Fourteen
different distributions are fitted to the maximum annual discharges and Peak over Threshold from each of these
stations, and parameters of these distributions are estimated using the method of maximum likelihood. The best
distribution is selected based on the goodness-of-fit tests.

3.1 Method of Maximum Likelihood

The method of maximum likelihood has been defined and applied to several probability distribution functions with
defined probability density functions (pdf). Such method has suitable characteristics like the invariance property
(Mood et al, 1974), and the asymptotically unbiasedness, sufficiency, consistency and efficiency in the large
sample estimation and applicability in estimating the parameters of complex probability density functions. The
likelihood function of N independent random variables is defined to be the joint probability density function of N
random variables and is viewed as a function of the parameters. If X1 , ..., XN is a random sample of a univariate
probability density function, the corresponding likelihood function for the observed X 1 , ..., XN sample is

(3)

where denotes the parameter set and f(( ) is the probability density function.
 Nibedita Guru and Ramakar Jha / Aquatic Procedia 4 (2015) 427 434 431

The logarithmic version of Eq. (1) is:

(4)

3.2 Goodness-of fit Test

The goodness of fit of a statistical model describes how well it fits a set of observations. Measures of goodness of
fit typically summarize the discrepancy between observed values and the values expected under the model in
question. In assessing whether a given distribution is suited to a dataset, the following test and their underlying
measures of fit can be used: Kolmogorov-Smirnov test, Anderson-Darling test and Chi Square test. In statistic, the
Kolmogorov-Smirnov test (KS test) is a nonparametric test for the equality of continuous, one-dimensional
probability distribution that can be used to compare a sample with a reference probability distribution (one-sample
KS test), or to compare two samples (two-sample KS test).

4. Results and Discussion

It has been observed that the values below 5% probability of exceedance are affecting the downstream regions and
may create disaster in Mahanadi basin. Keeping these criteria in view, the flood series having probability of
exceedance less than 5% were considered in the present work for both the gauging stations. It is interesting to note
that the log-normal plot of daily discharge data as POT values for both the stations also indicate an exponential
increase in discharge valves having probability of exceedance below 5% at Kesinga (upstream) and Kantamal
(downstream) stations Figure 3.

Figure.3. Log-normal plot of daily Discharge Data of Tel Sub-basin, India

After obtaining the AM and POT flood series (see Figure 3), they were analyzed using the exponential quantile
plots for quality control using mass curves, making time series plots to check if there are any outliers, to select the
model type, to fit extreme value distributions and to determine return periods. The analysis involved preparation of
the Q-Q plots and analysis of the behaviour of the distribution in the upper tail. On the basis of the results of this
analysis, the appropriate distribution was identified. The evaluation of the extreme value distribution using the
Exponential Q-Q plot is shown in Figures 4 and 5 for AM and POT flood series respectively. It has been observed
that the exponential Q-Q plot gave the upper tail points tending towards a straight line.
432 Nibedita Guru and Ramakar Jha / Aquatic Procedia 4 (2015) 427 434

Figure.4. Exponential Q -Q plot for AM for Kesinga and Kantamal

Figure.5. Exponential Q -Q plot for POT for Kesinga and Kantamal

Now, fourteen flood frequency distributions distribution employed, as discussed earlier, were tested for their
applicability for AM and POT data sets at both the gauging stations. Generalized Pareto (GP) distribution gives
best results for Annual Maximum flood series for which parameters were estimated using maximum likelihood
method. The governing equation used for GP developed by Pickands (1975) can be written as

(5)

Where , and are location, scale and shape parameters respectively.

The frequency distribution results are shown in figure 6.

Figure.6. Generalized Pareto plot of AM flood series for Kesinga and Kantamal
 Nibedita Guru and Ramakar Jha / Aquatic Procedia 4 (2015) 427 434 433

It is interesting to see that Log-Normal (3P) distribution shows best results when the flood series based on POT
were considered. The governing equation used for Log-Normal (3P) is written as

(6)

where is the scale parameter, is the location parameter and is the shape parameter.

The frequency distribution results are shown in Figure 7. Further analysis indicates that the GP model is also
providing very good results when we used POT data (rank 2) Figure 8.

Figure.7. LogNormal (3P) plot of POT flood series for Kesinga and Kantamal

Figure.8. Generalized Pareto plot of POT for Kesinga and Kantamal

The goodness of fit tests, including Kolmogorov- Smirnov (KS), Anderson-Darling (AD), and Chi-square for all
the data sets were done for Kesinga and Kantalmal gauging stations and is shown in Table 1.

Table 1. Goodness of fit test of AM and POT for Kesinga and Kantamal

Stations Best fit method Sample Size Kolmogorov-Smirnov Anderson- Chi Square
Darling
Statistic P-Value Statistic Statistic P-Value

Kesinga (AM) GP 31 0.07461 0.9901 0.16916 0.79029 0.93975

Kantamal GP 38 0.11074 0.69859 4.3249 NA NA
(AM) (Reject)
Kesinga (POT) LN(3P) 549 0.3162 0.63059 0.37597 9.7496 0.37155
434 Nibedita Guru and Ramakar Jha / Aquatic Procedia 4 (2015) 427 434

Kantamal LN(3P) 678 0.3214 0.47568 0.96416 16.789 0.05212

(POT) (Reject)
.
5. Conclusions

At-site analysis was performed using both the Annual Maximum and Peak over Threshold (POT) flood series data
sets of two stations (Kesinga and Kantamal) of Tel basin, Mahanadi river system, India. It has been observed that
the values below 5% probability of exceedance are affecting the downstream regions and may create disaster in
Mahanadi basin. Keeping these criteria in view, the flood series having probability of exceedance less than 5%
were considered in the present work as POT values for both the gauging stations. The results are very promising
and effective. The shape of the distributions tail analyzed using quantile-quantile plots to discriminate between
distributions based on their tail behaviour. The results indicated that the majority of both the stations used in the
analysis had their record values conforming to the normal tail behaviour. Out of Fourteen frequency distributions,
Generalized Pareto (GP) distribution showed the best results for AM data sets, whereas LN (3P) distribution
showed best results for POT data sets followed by GP distribution. The goodness of fit tests using Kolmogorov
Smirnov (KS), Anderson-Darling (AD), and Chi-square methods obtained indicates the suitability of the
distribution models for flood predictions.

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