| Abstract: | ABSTRACT: In recent years, several approaches to hydrologic frequency analysis have been proposed that enable one to direct attention to that portion of an overall probability distribution that is of greatest interest. The majority of the studies have focused on the upper tail of a distribution for flood analyses, though the same ideas can be applied to low flows. This paper presents an evaluation of the performances of five different estimation methods that place an emphasis on fitting the lower tail of the lognormal distribution for estimation of the ten‐year low‐flow quantile. The methods compared include distributional truncation, MLE treatment of censored data, partial probability weighted moments, LL‐moments, and expected moments. It is concluded that while there are some differences among the alternative methods in terms of their biases and root mean square errors, no one method consistently performs better than the others, particularly with recognition that the underlying population distribution is unknown. Therefore, it seems perfectly legitimate to make a selection of a method on the basis other criteria, such as ease of use. It is also shown in this paper that the five alternative methods can perform about as well as, if not better than, an estimation strategy involving fitting the complete lognormal distribution using L‐moments. |
