Design hydrograph estimation in small and fully ungauged basins: a preliminary assessment of EBA4SUB framework

Final version published on line: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/jfr3.12193

Abstract: Design hydrograph estimation in small and ungauged basins is still a critical
issue in hydrological studies. Although a great effort has been devoted to
improving the knowledge on this topic in the last 10 years, some unresolved
problems still limit the practitioners. Indeed, in small and ungauged watersheds
located in areas where regionalisation analyses are not available, hydrologists
still typically apply the rational formula. In a recent contribution, we proposed
an event-based framework illustrating its potential benefits over the widely used
rational formula and underlining its tendency to be less sensitive and less
subjective. In the present contribution, we present a preliminary assessment of
the proposed framework, analysing its application to five watersheds for which
enough observed data are available to provide an evaluation of the model’s
performance. Although the results confirm that the design hydrograph
estimation in small and ungauged basins is affected by relevant errors and
uncertainty, they also show that the proposed framework is promising for
practical hydrology.