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What do we really mean by a 'return period'?

5 minute read

Posted on March 15, 2019 by Mike Reeves, Engineering

Manager
There’s an urban myth that several years ago, the American Society of Civil
Engineers (ASCE) decided to hold its annual conference in Las Vegas. 10,000
engineers were to descend on the city for four days of doing what engineers do
in Las Vegas, talk about engineering. You can imagine that these things have to
be booked years in advance and the story goes that several months after the
booking was taken, the Las Vegas Chamber of Commerce wrote to the ASCE to
tell them they were cancelling the booking. The reason given was that they’d
done analysis which showed that the engineers would not spend enough money
in the casinos. We’re just too risk averse.

I was thinking about risk and chance recently when I read this article.

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Source: The Guardian, Feb 2019

Here's a link to the video if you want to see it in action.

Look at the sub-headline: Reservoir’s ood drain was expected to be used once
every 50 years, but has seen action twice in last two.

The word that caught my attention was 'but'. Although the article doesn’t clarify, is
it saying that if something is designed to operate once every 50 years, it cannot
operate twice in two consecutive years?

I think there are three possible reasons why it has operated as it has:

It was under-designed in the rst place

Things have changed since its construction in 1957, such as urbanisation of the
catchment and climate change. Today we take these things into account on
many designs, but could they realistically be expected to in 1957?
Northern California has had more than one big event recently

Into which of these three categories a design ‘failure’ falls is often the subject of
debate and in many cases legal action. It is the fear of many designers to explain
to a householder why their property has ooded twice recently although it is
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What is a return period?
We often use the term ‘return period’ to try and describe the possibility of events
happening. So in this case we could say that the reservoir is designed to a 1:50
year return period, sometimes expressed as a 2% or 0.02 chance. This means that
it should not fail during an event which occurs on average once every 50 years.
Does that mean that we could get two of these events in consecutive years?
Does it mean we could go 100 years without an event like this occurring? Yes,
both these things are possible, the question is, how likely are they?

An analogy would be a bag containing 50 tokens. 49 of the tokens are black and
one is red. You pull a token out at random. After you’ve pulled it out, you put it
back and the tokens are thoroughly mixed. If you pull a black token, you get £10.
If you pull the red token you have to pay £500. Do you want to play? How many
black tokens would there have to be for you to play? How much would the ne
for pulling the red token have to be reduced for you to play? How would you
spend your time in Las Vegas?

To predict how likely it is that rare events will occur within a de ned time period,
we can use a binomial or Poisson distribution, de ned here.

Using a binomial distribution, we can produce the following table:

The table shows that there is a 36.4% chance that a scheme would not
experience a 1:50 year event in 50 years. There is a 37.2% chance it will experience
one of these events and a 18.6% chance it will experience two of these events.

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What does the table look like if we reduce the time period from 50 years, to 2
years? In other words what is the distribution for a 1:50 year event over two years?

In other words, there is a 96% chance that the reservoir will not experience a 1:50
year event in any two consecutive year period. There is only a 0.04% chance that
it would experience two events in this time. Put another way, if we looked at
10,000 reservoirs, around 4 of them would have operated like this one. It gets
more complicated when we think that there have been 62 consecutive two-year
periods since 1957.

The article also talks about how, as well as the two recent events, there were also
events in 2006 and 1996 (as well as implying there was another event in 1997,
when a swimmer died.) What are the chances of that?

This time we extend the time period to 62 years (the time since the reservoir was
built)

So there was a 2.77% chance that four events would occur during this time. That's
not unbelievable, in fact, it's barely even newsworthy.

You’ll notice during this article, we’ve talked about “event” rather than “storm”. This
is where things really start to get complicated. Firstly, there isn’t just one 1:50 year
storm! In the UK, if 35mm of rainfall lands on a catchment in one hour, that is
roughly a 1:50 year storm. However, 60mm landing in 4 hours is also a 1:50 year
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storm. Notice that although the storm duration has increased by a factor of four,
the rainfall depth has not even doubled. So as rainfall events get longer, they also
get bigger (more depth) but not necessarily by that much.

A short, intense event would have very little impact on this reservoir, whereas a
long event would. We then need to consider a combination of storms. What are
the chances of a 1:30 year storm happening, which nearly lls the reservoir,
followed closely by a 1:2 year storm which causes it to spill? We then need to
consider outside in uences. What are the chances of the discharge from the
reservoir being reduced (perhaps they’re building a bridge downstream) and then
a large storm hitting the catchment? What are the chances of the rainfall landing
when the catchment is very dry and therefore all the rainfall simply soaks in to
the soil? These are all reasons why we use complex hydraulic models, such as
InfoWorks ICM to test all these scenarios.

The headline could have been “reservoir was designed to a 1:50 year return
period and has been exceeded twice in the last two, which is quite unlucky”.

Tell us what you think.

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