Use of peak over threshold data for flood frequency estimation: an application at the UK national scale

This study investigates choices of statistical distributions to represent the threshold exceedance frequency and magnitude of peaks-over-threshold (POT) series from a national dataset of extreme hydrological events from 842 gauging stations in the UK. From the initial POT series, two new series were created, POT1 and POT3, representing POT series with an average of, respectively, one and three exceedances per year. Using a χ ² goodness-of-fit test, the choice of distributions for both the annual exceedance counts and the magnitude of threshold exceedances were explored for both the POT1 and POT3 datasets. The results show that the negative binomial and geometrical distributions provide a better fit to the annual exceedance count than the Poisson distribution typically assumed. These results are particularly pronounced when considering the POT3 dataset and in the South-East of the UK where many river flow series are dominated by slow responding groundwater dominated catchments. Finally, estimates of design floods with a return period of 2 and 100 years were obtained for each POT series and compared to the equivalent estimates obtained from direct at-site analysis of the annual maximum series. The results show a good alignment between the magnitude of the design floods estimated by the two methods, but a generally lower standard deviation of estimates obtained from the POT data, as quantified using a bootstrap procedure. The results presented here show that the POT series could beneficially replace the current operational guidelines based on annual maximum series for design flood estimation in the UK.