Parametric and non-parametric approaches for runoff and rainfall regionalization

The information on river flows is important for a number of reasons including; the construction of hydraulic structures for water management, for equitable distribution of water and for a number of environmental issues. The flow measurement devices are generally installed across the workspace at various locations to get data on river flows but due to a number of technical and accessibility issues, it is not always possible to get continuous data. The amount rainfall in a basin area also contributes towards the river flows and intense rainfall can cause flooding. The extended rainfall maps for the study areas to analyze these extreme events can be of great practical and theoretical interest. This thesis can be generally regarded as a work on catchment hydrology and mapping rainfall extremes to estimate certain hydrological variables that are not only useful for future research but also for practical designing and management issues. We analyzed a number of existing techniques available in literature to extend the hydrological information from gauged basin to ungauged basin; and suggested improvements. The three main frontiers of our work are: Monthly runoff regime regionalization, Flow duration curves (FDCs) regionalization and preparing rainfall hazardous maps. The proposed methods of regionalization for runoff regime and FDCs are tested for the basins located in northern Italy; whereas for rainfall extremes, the procedure is applied to the data points located in northern part of Pakistan.