Is point uncertain rainfall likely to have a great impact on distributed complex hydrological modeling?

Uncertainty analysis has become an important topic in environmental research. Uncertainty in hydrological modeling, in general, has been studied by investigating mainly the influence of the parameter uncertainty on the uncertainty of the simulated outputs. This paper focuses essentially on the impac...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Water resources research 2010-11, Vol.46 (11), p.n/a
Main Authors: Balin, Daniela, Lee, Hyosang, Rode, Michael
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Bayesian MCMC and Gibbs
Environmental research
Hydrologic models
hydrological modeling
Hydrology
measurement error
Precipitation
Rainfall measurement
Runoff
Simulation
Stream flow
Topography
Uncertainty
WASIM-ETH
Watersheds
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Summary:Uncertainty analysis has become an important topic in environmental research. Uncertainty in hydrological modeling, in general, has been studied by investigating mainly the influence of the parameter uncertainty on the uncertainty of the simulated outputs. This paper focuses essentially on the impact of point input uncertainty on fully distributed hydrological modeling and proposes an integrated approach to cope with input and parameter uncertainty. The approach uses Bayesian theory in two steps: first, to compute the uncertainty in input forcing data, and second, to compute the hydrological parameter uncertainty and the uncertainties of a lumped‐error term that include other sources of errors: response errors and model error. The method is applied with a fully distributed model: WaSiM‐ETH. The results show that the methodology proposed here is a valuable tool to assess different sources of uncertainty in hydrological modeling and show the effects of uncertainty in the input forcing when a fully distributed, physically based hydrological model is used.
ISSN:0043-1397
1944-7973
DOI:10.1029/2009WR007848