On Return Period of the Largest Historical Flood

       The 6th ENGII Conference——The use of nonsystematic flood data for statistical purposes depends on reliability of assessment both flood magnitudes and their return period. The earliest known extreme flood year is usually the beginning of the historical record. Even though the magnitudes of historic floods are properly assessed, a problem of their retun periods remains unsolved. Only largest flood (XM) is known during whole historical period and its occurrence carves the mark of the beginning of the historical period and defines its length (L). So, it is a common practice of using the earliest known flood year as the beginning of the record. It means that the L value selected is an empirical estimate of the lower bound on the effective historical length M.