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

• 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: Hudson Bay
• 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

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.