Regional Frequency Distribution Type of Low Flow in North of Iran by L-moments

A regional low flow frequency analysis in the north of Iran using L-moments was carried out. Low flow events have been represented by the 7-day annual minimum series and the L-moments approach was used to assign these data into homogenous regions. According to the homogeneity measure and climatic properties, two subdivisions were found – one in the west of the study area having a homogenous assemblage of sites, and one in the east in which the sites were found to be heterogeneous. The regional low flow frequency distribution was derived for the western division using L-moments and goodness of fit tests were used to evaluate which of a number of possible distributions best represented this. The evaluation suggested that the Generalized Logistic distribution gives the best overall result. For heterogeneous subdivision, the performance of the 2-parameter distribution such as 2-parameter Log Normal, Normal and Gamma distributions gave the best result for the majority of sites. Regional and at-site frequency curves were also compared for the western division, which showed that the quantile estimates could be very different in the upper and lower tails of the distribution. The influence on flow regime and watershed properties on the type of the best fit distribution was investigated which showed that the 2 and 3 parameter distributions do not have a clear relationship with climatic and physiographic characteristics of the watersheds except the watershed area. This may result in simple scaling laws of low flows. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2008