Quantile estimation with more or less floodlike distributions

摘要

The desirable properties of an estimator relative to a hypothetical population may be irrelevant in practice unless the population at issue more or less resembles the hypothetical population. Evidence that floods are distributed with long, stretched upper tails suggests that use of the more common distributions results in a rather precise underestimation of the extreme quantiles and thereby in the underdesign of flood protection measures.