Synthetic hydrograph generation by hydrological donors

A method to build synthetic hydrographs is introduced, based on 1300 gauging stations in France and Switzerland, covering a wide range of size and climatology. For each station, an average of two floods per year are selected by a peak-over-threshold method, providing about 69?000 hydrographs. For a given catchment, some “donor stations” are selected with criteria of proximity in space, size and runoff production. These donors provide hundreds of hydrographs which can complement the ones recorded locally, or replace them if no hydrograph is available. With this subset of hydrographs, one can estimate the catchment’s average peak-to-volume ratio of floods, and build the corresponding median hydrograph. Another application is, for a given daily discharge sequence (being observed or simulated), to generate a relevant synthetic hydrograph by combining appropriate hydrographs of the subset. These methods are assessed by performing a jack-knife validation on a wide dataset of stations.