Multivariate homogeneity testing in a northern case study in the province of Quebec,Canada

In regional frequency analysis, the examination of the regional homogeneity represents an important step of the procedure. Flood events possess multivariate characteristics which can not be handled by classical univariate regional procedures. For instance, classical procedures do not allow to assess regional homogeneity while taking into consideration flood peak, volume and duration. Chebana and Ouarda proposed multivariate discordancy and homogeneity tests. They carried out a simulation study to evaluate the performance of these tests. In the present paper, practical aspects are investigated jointly on flood peak and flood volume of a data set from the Côte‐Nord region in the province of Quebec, Canada. It is shown that, after removing the discordant sites, the remaining ones constitute a homogeneous region for the volumes and heterogeneous region for the peaks. However, if both variables are jointly considered, the obtained region is possibly homogeneous. Furthermore, the results demonstrate the usefulness of the bivariate test to take into account the dependence structure between the variables representing the event, and to take advantage of more information from the hydrograph. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.