Modeling flood event characteristics using D-vine structures

The authors investigate the use of drawable (D-)vine structures to model the dependences existing among the main characteristics of a flood event, i.e., flood volume, flood peak, duration, and peak time. Firstly, different three- and four-dimensional probability distributions were built considering all the permutations of the conditioning variables. The Frank copula was used to model the dependence of each pair of variables. Then, the appropriate D-vine structures were selected using information criteria and a goodness-of-fit test. The influence of varying the data length on the selected D-vine structure was also investigated. Finally, flood event characteristics were simulated using the four-dimensional D-vine structure.