Flood frequency analysis of southern Africa: I. Delineation of homogeneousregions

A graphical test is presented to check if recorded annual maximum flood dat a for a group of gauging stations in a region belong to a common parent dis tribution (P). The test compares the observed at site L-coefficient of vari ation (Lcv) with its sampling distribution. The latter is obtained by gener ating synthetic sequences from an assumed parent distribution (P). A group of sites is deemed to be homogeneous if the observed Lcv, treated as an ord er statistic, lies within its sampling distribution. The proposed test has been applied to annual maximum flood data from Tanzania to delineate the co untry into 12 homogeneous regions.