Comparison between the peaks-over-threshold method and the annual maximum method for flood frequency analysis

Flood frequency analysis can be made by using two types of flood peak series, i.e. the annual maximum (AM) and peaks-over-threshold (POT) series. This study presents a comparison of the results of both methods for data from the Litija 1 gauging station on the Sava River in Slovenia. Six commonly used distribution functions and three different parameter estimation techniques were considered in the AM analyses. The results showed a better performance for the method of L-moments (ML) when compared with the conventional moments and maximum likelihood estimation. The combination of the ML and the log-Pearson type 3 distribution gave the best results of all the considered AM cases. The POT method gave better results than the AM method. The binomial distribution did not offer any noticeable improvement over the Poisson distribution for modelling the annual number of exceedences above the threshold.