Detecting Trends in the Annual Maximum Discharges in the Vah River Basin, Slovakia

A number of floods have been observed in the Slovak Republic in recent years, thereby raising awareness of and concern about flood risks. The paper focuses on the trend detection in the annual maximum discharge series in the Vah River basin located in Slovak Republic. Analysis was performed on data obtained from 59 gauging stations with minimum lengths of the observations from 40 years to 109 years. Homogeneity of the time series was tested by Alexandersson test for single shift at 5% level of significance. The Mann-Kendall trend test and its correction for autocorrelated data by Hamed and Rao (1998) were used to analyse the significance of detected changes in discharges. The series were analysed at different lengths of 40, 50, 60 years and whole observation period. Statistically significant rising and decreasing trends in the annual maximum discharge series were found in different regions of the Vah River catchments