The ICI-RAFT Development Process

The International Center for Integrated Water Resources Management (ICIWaRM) Regional Analysis of Frequency Tool (ICI-RAFT) is the result of work performed in order to support the overall mission of ICIWaRM to aid developing countries in water resource management in terms of climate change adaptation with a focus on extreme events and to contribute to the development of non-propriety analytical tools. In order to further accomplish the mission of ICIWaRM as a Category II UNESCO center and in the spirit of UNESCO, the software is offered at no cost; the only costs associated with the software involve expenses associated with the additional programs that are required to fully utilize ICI-RAFT, such as Microsoft Excel and ESRI ArcGIS or other similar GIS software.

ICI-RAFT was developed from scratch with much of the inspiration coming from the book by Hosking & Wallis titled “Regional Frequency Analysis using L-moments”, while some of the code used to develop the software was taken from the FORTRAN code provided by Hosking & Wallis and rewritten in order to accommodate Visual Basic 2010. The method of L-moments is preferred over using regular moments due to the fact that L-moment statistics are more robust in terms of accommodating extreme values and characterizing a greater number of frequency distributions. In addition, L-moments are less susceptible to bias in their estimation.