Effect of Streamflow Measurement Error on Flood Frequency Estimation

Engineers, planers, and risk managements design and take decisions based on the estimated magnitude of potential future floods.These estimates are known as flood frequency estimation (FFE) and are of high relevance many aspects of our day to day life. In this exiting work, we explored how hypothetical streamflow measurement errors can change FFE. We performed our analysis using peak flow observations at four watersheds in Iowa and the Bulletin 17C software (PeakFQ) to compute FFE. We created hyphotetical scenarios changing the observed peaks using a random error. According to our results, measurement errors can lead to significant FFE underestimations that can lead to catasrophic consequences.

You can read the paper here

The data and information used for this study can be obtained at this GitHub repository.