A design of experiment aided sensitivity analysis and parameterization for hydrological modeling

To provide a better understanding of the water balance in the Deer River watershed of the Hudson Bay lowlands, the Semi-distributed Land Use-based Runoff Process hydrological model was applied to simulate the runoff over a 20 year period. The purpose of this study is to develop an approach to examin...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Canadian Journal of Civil Engineering
Main Authors: Wu, Hongjing, Lye, Leonard M., Chen, Bing
Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
Language:English
Published: Canadian Science Publishing 2012
Subjects:
Online Access:http://dx.doi.org/10.1139/l2012-017
http://www.nrcresearchpress.com/doi/full-xml/10.1139/l2012-017
http://www.nrcresearchpress.com/doi/pdf/10.1139/l2012-017
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Summary:To provide a better understanding of the water balance in the Deer River watershed of the Hudson Bay lowlands, the Semi-distributed Land Use-based Runoff Process hydrological model was applied to simulate the runoff over a 20 year period. The purpose of this study is to develop an approach to examine the sensitivity of the ten parameters and their interactions via statistical design of experiment methodology. Using the proposed approach, the contribution of each parameter and how they interact with one another were evaluated. The results indicated that the interaction between “retention constant for fast storage” and “precipitation factor” had the greatest positive impact on the Nash–Sutcliffe efficiency (NSE) and the quadratic factor term of “precipitation factor” had the greatest negative effect on the NSE. The proposed approach provided an effective tool for evaluating the contribution of the input parameters and could also be applied for calibration of other hydrological models.