Estimating instantaneous peak flow from mean daily flow

While instantaneous peak flow (IPF) records have historically been necessary for practical applications in flood risk management and hydraulic structure design, mean daily flow (MDF) values are often all that are available. To address this problem, we propose a simple method, which requires only MDF records as its input and uses the rising and falling slopes of daily hydrographs, to estimate IPFs. We applied this method to 144 catchments in Iowa, USA, with drainage areas ranging from about 7 to 220,000 km2. This application involves about 3800 peak flow events originating from different flood generation mechanisms over the period from 1997 to 2014. About 55% of the catchments have prediction errors within ±10%, and 85% of the catchments have predictions errors within ±20%. The method works well for catchments larger than 500 km2, poorly for catchments smaller than 100 km2, and fairly well for catchments in between these sizes. The reduction in the method's effectiveness with decreasing catchment size is due to the fact that the smaller the catchment, the more information is lost when using MDF to characterize the instantaneous flow processes. Our proposed method is simple and promising in terms of estimating IPFs from MDFs for areas where IPF records are unavailable or are insufficient.