Scaling properties of flood peaks (Q1848518)

The paper is devoted to modeling of the flood peak distributions for drainage basins. The authors are interested in dependence of these distributions from the drainage area. It is demonstrated that two major theories of this dependence (simple-scaling and multi-scaling) do not describe adequately the behavior of the coefficient of variation (CV) of these distributions which are observed empirically. A model for rainfall simulation and a drainage network runoff is described which uses knowledge of spatial and temporal organization of rainfalls together with the details of the network structure of drainage basins. The CV diagram of simulated flood peaks by 100 non-nested sub-basins of the Guadalupe river basin demonstrates a shape similar to that obtained from the empirical studies of actual flood peaks data.