Development of a Regional Non-dimensional Return Period Flood Model

Based on the non-dimensional approach, this study focuses on developing a model to compute design flood for specific return periods whose parameter estimations are done using the Marquardt algorithm considering peak flood data of 100 Indian catchments. The selected flood data varies for majority of the sites for a period of 10 years, and for a few sites up to 36 years; and as a preliminary processing these data are checked for outliers, discordancy, and other errors. The model is calibrated for a variety of situations, and validated on selected gauged catchments. Both the descriptive and predictive goodness-of-fit measures are computed considering the floods of specific return periods estimated from the observed data. The model is found to perform well for the whole study area. Investigations reveal the model to be useful to any catchment within the hydrologically homogeneous region with limited or no flood data conditions. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010