scholarly journals Comparing impacts of parameter and spatial data uncertainty for a grid-based distributed watershed model

2016 ◽  
Vol 18 (6) ◽  
pp. 961-974 ◽  
Author(s):  
Younggu Her ◽  
Conrad Heatwole
Keyword(s):  
Land Cover ◽  
Parameter Uncertainty ◽  
Input Data ◽  
Hydrologic Model ◽  
Data Uncertainty ◽  
Model Parameters ◽  
Model Output ◽  
Model Errors ◽  
Land Cover Data ◽  
The Impact

Parameter uncertainty in hydrologic modeling is commonly evaluated, but assessing the impact of spatial input data uncertainty in spatially descriptive ‘distributed’ models is not common. This study compares the significance of uncertainty in spatial input data and model parameters on the output uncertainty of a distributed hydrology and sediment transport model, HYdrology Simulation using Time-ARea method (HYSTAR). The Shuffled Complex Evolution Metropolis (SCEM-UA) algorithm was used to quantify parameter uncertainty of the model. Errors in elevation and land cover layers were simulated using the Sequential Gaussian/Indicator Simulation (SGS/SIS) techniques and then incorporated into the model to evaluate their impact on the outputs relative to those of the parameter uncertainty. This study demonstrated that parameter uncertainty had a greater impact on model output than did errors in the spatial input data. In addition, errors in elevation data had a greater impact on model output than did errors in land cover data. Thus, for the HYSTAR distributed hydrologic model, accuracy and reliability can be improved more effectively by refining parameters rather than further improving the accuracy of spatial input data and by emphasizing the topographic data over the land cover data.

scholarly journals MOESHA: A Genetic Algorithm for Automatic Calibration and Estimation of Parameter Uncertainty and Sensitivity of Hydrologic Models

2017 ◽  
Vol 60 (4) ◽  
pp. 1259-1269 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bradley L. Barnhart ◽  
Keith A. Sawicz ◽  
Darren L. Ficklin ◽  
Gerald W. Whittaker
Keyword(s):  
Genetic Algorithm ◽  
Sensitivity Analysis ◽  
Parameter Uncertainty ◽  
Model Uncertainty ◽  
Hydrologic Modeling ◽  
Hydrologic Model ◽  
Sensitivity Analyses ◽  
Model Parameters ◽  
Model Output ◽  
Discharge Data

Abstract. Characterization of the uncertainty and sensitivity of model parameters is an essential facet of hydrologic modeling. This article introduces the multi-objective evolutionary sensitivity handling algorithm (MOESHA) that combines input parameter uncertainty and sensitivity analyses with a genetic algorithm calibration routine to dynamically sample the parameter space. This novel algorithm serves as an alternative to traditional static space-sampling methods, such as stratified sampling or Latin hypercube sampling. In addition to calibrating model parameters to a hydrologic model, MOESHA determines the optimal distribution of model parameters that maximizes model robustness and minimizes error, and the results provide an estimate for model uncertainty due to the uncertainty in model parameters. Subsequently, we compare the model parameter distributions to the distribution of a dummy variable (i.e., a variable that does not affect model output) to differentiate between impactful (i.e., sensitive) and non-impactful parameters. In this way, an optimally calibrated model is produced, and estimations of model uncertainty as well as the relative impact of model parameters on model output (i.e., sensitivity) are determined. A case study using a single-cell hydrologic model (EXP-HYDRO) is used to test the method using river discharge data from the Dee River catchment in Wales. We compare the results of MOESHA with Sobol’s global sensitivity analysis method and demonstrate that the algorithm is able to pinpoint non-impactful parameters, demonstrate the uncertainty of model results with respect to uncertainties in model parameters, and achieve excellent calibration results. A major drawback of the algorithm is that it is computationally expensive; therefore, parallelized methods should be used to reduce the computational burden. Keywords: Genetic algorithm, Hydrologic modeling, Model calibration, Sensitivity analysis, Uncertainty.

scholarly journals High-resolution inversion of OMI formaldehyde columns to quantify isoprene emission on ecosystem-relevant scales: application to the southeast US

2018 ◽  
Vol 18 (8) ◽  
pp. 5483-5497 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer Kaiser ◽  
Daniel J. Jacob ◽  
Lei Zhu ◽  
Katherine R. Travis ◽  
Jenny A. Fisher ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
High Resolution ◽  
Land Cover ◽  
Satellite Data ◽  
Data Uncertainty ◽  
Emission Inventories ◽  
Model Errors ◽  
Atmospheric Models ◽  
Isoprene Emission ◽  
Isoprene Oxidation ◽  
Southeast Us

Abstract. Isoprene emissions from vegetation have a large effect on atmospheric chemistry and air quality. “Bottom-up” isoprene emission inventories used in atmospheric models are based on limited vegetation information and uncertain land cover data, leading to potentially large errors. Satellite observations of atmospheric formaldehyde (HCHO), a high-yield isoprene oxidation product, provide “top-down” information to evaluate isoprene emission inventories through inverse analyses. Past inverse analyses have however been hampered by uncertainty in the HCHO satellite data, uncertainty in the time- and NOx-dependent yield of HCHO from isoprene oxidation, and coarse resolution of the atmospheric models used for the inversion. Here we demonstrate the ability to use HCHO satellite data from OMI in a high-resolution inversion to constrain isoprene emissions on ecosystem-relevant scales. The inversion uses the adjoint of the GEOS-Chem chemical transport model at 0.25∘ × 0.3125∘ horizontal resolution to interpret observations over the southeast US in August–September 2013. It takes advantage of concurrent NASA SEAC4RS aircraft observations of isoprene and its oxidation products including HCHO to validate the OMI HCHO data over the region, test the GEOS-Chem isoprene oxidation mechanism and NOx environment, and independently evaluate the inversion. This evaluation shows in particular that local model errors in NOx concentrations propagate to biases in inferring isoprene emissions from HCHO data. It is thus essential to correct model NOx biases, which was done here using SEAC4RS observations but can be done more generally using satellite NO2 data concurrently with HCHO. We find in our inversion that isoprene emissions from the widely used MEGAN v2.1 inventory are biased high over the southeast US by 40 % on average, although the broad-scale distributions are correct including maximum emissions in Arkansas/Louisiana and high base emission factors in the oak-covered Ozarks of southeast Missouri. A particularly large discrepancy is in the Edwards Plateau of central Texas where MEGAN v2.1 is too high by a factor of 3, possibly reflecting errors in land cover. The lower isoprene emissions inferred from our inversion, when implemented into GEOS-Chem, decrease surface ozone over the southeast US by 1–3 ppb and decrease the isoprene contribution to organic aerosol from 40 to 20 %.

The Impact of Land Cover Data on Rainfall-Runoff Prediction Using an Entity-Aware-LSTM

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sebastian Drost ◽  
Fabian Netzel ◽  
Andreas Wytzisk-Ahrens ◽  
Christoph Mudersbach
Keyword(s):  
Land Cover ◽  
Short Term Memory ◽  
Land Cover Changes ◽  
Rainfall Runoff ◽  
Corine Land Cover ◽  
Land Cover Data ◽  
Modelling Problem ◽  
Long Short Term Memory ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Process Based Models

<p>The application of Deep Learning methods for modelling rainfall-runoff have reached great advances in the last years. Especially, long short-term memory (LSTM) networks have gained enhanced attention for time-series prediction. The architecture of this special kind of recurrent neural network is optimized for learning long-term dependencies from large time-series datasets. Thus, different studies proved the applicability of LSTM networks for rainfall-runoff predictions and showed, that they are capable of outperforming other types of neural networks (Hu et al., 2018).</p><p>Understanding the impact of land-cover changes on rainfall-runoff dynamics is an important task. Such a hydrological modelling problem typically is solved with process-based models by varying model-parameters related to land-cover-incidents at different points in time. Kratzert et al. (2019) proposed an adaption of the standard LSTM architecture, called Entity-Aware-LSTM (EA-LSTM), which can take static catchment attributes as input features to overcome the regional modelling problem and provides a promising approach for similar use cases. Hence, our contribution aims to analyse the suitability of EA-LSTM for assessing the effect of land-cover changes.</p><p>In different experimental setups, we train standard LSTM and EA-LSTM networks for multiple small subbasins, that are associated to the Wupper region in Germany. Gridded daily precipitation data from the REGNIE dataset (Rauthe et al., 2013), provided by the German Weather Service (DWD), is used as model input to predict the daily discharge for each subbasin. For training the EA-LSTM we use land cover information from the European CORINE Land Cover (CLC) inventory as static input features. The CLC inventory includes Europe-wide timeseries of land cover in 44 classes as well as land cover changes for different time periods (Büttner, 2014). The percentage proportion of each land cover class within a subbasin serves as static input features. To evaluate the impact of land cover data on rainfall-runoff prediction, we compare the results of the EA-LSTM with those of the standard LSTM considering different statistical measures as well as the Nash–Sutcliffe efficiency (NSE).</p><p>In addition, we test the ability of the EA-LSTM to outperform physical process-based models. For this purpose, we utilize existing and calibrated hydrological models within the Wupper basin to simulate discharge for each subbasin. Finally, performance metrics of the calibrated model are used as benchmarks for assessing the performance of the EA-LSTM model.</p><p><strong>References</strong></p><p>Büttner, G. (2014). CORINE Land Cover and Land Cover Change Products. In: Manakos & M. Braun (Hrsg.), Land Use and Land Cover Mapping in Europe (Bd. 18, S. 55–74). Springer Netherlands. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-7969-3_5</p><p>Hu, C., Wu, Q., Li, H., Jian, S., Li, N., & Lou, Z. (2018). Deep Learning with a Long Short-Term Memory Networks Approach for Rainfall-Runoff Simulation. Water, 10(11), 1543. https://doi.org/10.3390/w10111543</p><p>Kratzert, F., Klotz, D., Shalev, G., Klambauer, G., Hochreiter, S., & Nearing, G. (2019). Towards learning universal, regional, and local hydrological behaviors via machine learning applied to large-sample datasets. Hydrology and Earth System Sciences, 23(12), 5089–5110. https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-23-5089-2019</p><p>Rauthe, M, Steiner, H, Riediger, U, Mazurkiewicz, A &Gratzki, A (2013): A Central European precipitation climatology – Part I: Generation and validation of a high-resolution gridded daily data set (HYRAS), Meteorologische Zeitschrift, Vol 22, No 3, 235–256. https://doi.org/10.1127/0941-2948/2013/0436</p>

scholarly journals Analyzing the Uncertainty of Degree Confluence Project for Validating Global Land-Cover Maps Using Reference Data-Based Classification Schemes

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (16) ◽  
pp. 2589
Author(s):  
Tana Qian ◽  
Tsuguki Kinoshita ◽  
Minoru Fujii ◽  
Yuhai Bao
Keyword(s):  
Land Cover ◽  
Reference Data ◽  
Data Uncertainty ◽  
Validation Data ◽  
Classification Schemes ◽  
Reference Information ◽  
Global Land Cover ◽  
Global Land ◽  
Land Cover Maps ◽  
The Impact

Global land-cover products play an important role in assisting the understanding of climate-related changes and the assessment of progress in the implementation of international initiatives for the mitigation of, and adaption to, climate change. However, concerns over the accuracies of land-cover products remain, due to the issue of validation data uncertainty. The volunteer-based Degree Confluence Project (DCP) was created in 1996, and it has been used to provide useful ground-reference information. This study aims to investigate the impact of DCP-based validation data uncertainty and the thematic issues on map accuracies. We built a reference dataset based on the DCP-interpreted dataset and applied a comparison for three existing global land-cover maps and DCP dataset-based probability maps under different classification schemes. The results of the obtained confusion matrices indicate that the uncertainty, including the number of classes and the confusion in mosaic classes, leads to a decrease in map accuracy. This paper proposes an informative classification scheme that uses a matrix structure of unaggregated land-cover and land-use classes, and has the potential to assist in the land-cover interpretation and validation processes. The findings of this study can potentially serve as a guide to select reference data and choose/define appropriate classification schemes.

scholarly journals A comparison of the discrete cosine and wavelet transforms for hydrologic model input data reduction

2017 ◽  
Vol 21 (7) ◽  
pp. 3827-3838 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ashley Wright ◽  
Jeffrey P. Walker ◽  
David E. Robertson ◽  
Valentijn R. N. Pauwels
Keyword(s):  
Parameter Estimation ◽  
Data Reduction ◽  
Wavelet Transforms ◽  
Input Data ◽  
Hydrologic Model ◽  
Data Uncertainty ◽  
Discrete Wavelet ◽  
Rainfall Time Series ◽  
Data Set ◽  
Model Input

Abstract. The treatment of input data uncertainty in hydrologic models is of crucial importance in the analysis, diagnosis and detection of model structural errors. Data reduction techniques decrease the dimensionality of input data, thus allowing modern parameter estimation algorithms to more efficiently estimate errors associated with input uncertainty and model structure. The discrete cosine transform (DCT) and discrete wavelet transform (DWT) are used to reduce the dimensionality of observed rainfall time series for the 438 catchments in the Model Parameter Estimation Experiment (MOPEX) data set. The rainfall time signals are then reconstructed and compared to the observed hyetographs using standard simulation performance summary metrics and descriptive statistics. The results convincingly demonstrate that the DWT is superior to the DCT in preserving and characterizing the observed rainfall data records. It is recommended that the DWT be used for model input data reduction in hydrology in preference over the DCT.

scholarly journals Control mechanisms for stochastic biochemical systems via computation of reachable sets

2017 ◽  
Vol 4 (8) ◽  
pp. 160790 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eszter Lakatos ◽  
Michael P. H. Stumpf
Keyword(s):  
Synthetic Biology ◽  
Parameter Uncertainty ◽  
Control Measures ◽  
Model Parameters ◽  
Control Mechanisms ◽  
Molecular Processes ◽  
Biochemical Systems ◽  
Mrna And Protein Expression ◽  
Engineered Systems ◽  
The Impact

Controlling the behaviour of cells by rationally guiding molecular processes is an overarching aim of much of synthetic biology. Molecular processes, however, are notoriously noisy and frequently nonlinear. We present an approach to studying the impact of control measures on motifs of molecular interactions that addresses the problems faced in many biological systems: stochasticity, parameter uncertainty and nonlinearity. We show that our reachability analysis formalism can describe the potential behaviour of biological (naturally evolved as well as engineered) systems, and provides a set of bounds on their dynamics at the level of population statistics: for example, we can obtain the possible ranges of means and variances of mRNA and protein expression levels, even in the presence of uncertainty about model parameters.

Sensitivity analysis of an integrated numerical flow model output to key parameters used in common qualitative vulnerability assessment methods

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joanna Doummar ◽  
Assaad H. Kassem
Keyword(s):  
Sensitivity Analysis ◽  
Vulnerability Assessment ◽  
Groundwater Vulnerability ◽  
Assessment Methods ◽  
Qualitative Assessment ◽  
Model Parameters ◽  
Karst Aquifers ◽  
Model Output ◽  
Local Sensitivity ◽  
The Impact

<p>Qualitative vulnerability assessment methods applied in karst aquifers rely on key factors in the hydrological compartments usually assigned different weights according to their estimated impact on groundwater vulnerability. Based on an integrated numerical groundwater model on a snow-governed karst catchment area (Assal Spring- Lebanon), the aim of this work is to quantify the importance of the most influential parameters on recharge and spring discharge and outline potential parameters that are not accounted for in standard methods, when in fact they do play a role in the intrinsic vulnerability of a system. The assessment of the model sensitivity and the ranking of parameters are conducted using an automatic calibration tool for local sensitivity analysis in addition to a variance-based local sensitivity assessment of model output time series (recharge and discharge)  for two consecutive years (2016-2017) to various model parameters. The impact of each parameter was normalized to estimate standardized weights for each of the process based key-controlling parameters. Parameters to which model was sensitive were factors related to soil, 2) fast infiltration (bypass function) typical of karst aquifers, 3) climatic parameters (melting temperature and degree day coefficient) and 4) aquifer hydraulic properties that play a major role in groundwater vulnerability inducing a temporal effect and varied recession. Other less important parameters play different roles according to different assigned weights proportional to their ranking. Additionally, the effect of slope/geomorphology (e.g., dolines) was further investigated.  In general, this study shows that the weighting coefficients assigned to key vulnerability factors in the qualitative assessment methods can be reevaluated based on this process-based approach.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p>

scholarly journals Climate-driven disturbances in the San Juan River sub-basin of the Colorado River

2018 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 709-725 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katrina E. Bennett ◽  
Theodore J. Bohn ◽  
Kurt Solander ◽  
Nathan G. McDowell ◽  
Chonggang Xu ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Water Resources ◽  
Land Cover ◽  
River Basin ◽  
Colorado River ◽  
Hydrologic Model ◽  
San Juan ◽  
Forest Disturbances ◽  
San Juan River ◽  
The Impact

Abstract. Accelerated climate change and associated forest disturbances in the southwestern USA are anticipated to have substantial impacts on regional water resources. Few studies have quantified the impact of both climate change and land cover disturbances on water balances on the basin scale, and none on the regional scale. In this work, we evaluate the impacts of forest disturbances and climate change on a headwater basin to the Colorado River, the San Juan River watershed, using a robustly calibrated (Nash–Sutcliffe efficiency 0.76) hydrologic model run with updated formulations that improve estimates of evapotranspiration for semi-arid regions. Our results show that future disturbances will have a substantial impact on streamflow with implications for water resource management. Our findings are in contradiction with conventional thinking that forest disturbances reduce evapotranspiration and increase streamflow. In this study, annual average regional streamflow under the coupled climate–disturbance scenarios is at least 6–11 % lower than those scenarios accounting for climate change alone; for forested zones of the San Juan River basin, streamflow is 15–21 % lower. The monthly signals of altered streamflow point to an emergent streamflow pattern related to changes in forests of the disturbed systems. Exacerbated reductions of mean and low flows under disturbance scenarios indicate a high risk of low water availability for forested headwater systems of the Colorado River basin. These findings also indicate that explicit representation of land cover disturbances is required in modeling efforts that consider the impact of climate change on water resources.

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