Environmental Sciences & Ecology
; Water Resources
英文摘要:
The return period measures the rareness of extreme events such as floods and droughts that might cause huge damages to the society and the environment; hence, it lies at the heart of hydraulic design and risk assessment problems. Indeed, return period is a commonly applied probabilistic concept in the hydrologic literature, which has attracted renewed interest stimulated by the need of efficiently dealing with complex processes in a changing environment. In this study, the concept of return period and the related risk of failure are presented by making use of a general mathematical framework. It helps for a better understanding of the return period and risk of failure formulations that are commonly adopted in practical engineering applications. The framework can be further applied under more general conditions. In particular, the extension of the return period concept to nonstationary and time-dependent cases is discussed herein, by relaxing the hypotheses commonly (and sometimes implicitly) assumed that allows to derive simple analytic formulations. This article is categorized under: Engineering Water > Planning Water Engineering Water > Methods Science of Water > Methods