Abstract
Hydrologic cycle is a complex system associated with both certain and uncertain constituents. The propagation of confidence bounds from different uncertainty sources to model output is of great significance for hydrologic modeling. In this paper, we applied the integrated bayesian uncertainty estimator to quantify the effects of parameter, input and model structure uncertainty on hydrologic modeling progressively. Two hydrologic models (Xinanjiang model and TOPMODEL) were applied to a humid catchment under three scenarios. Case I: the shuffled complex evolution metropolis (SCEM-UA) algorithm was conducted to determine the posterior parameter distribution of hydrologic models and analyze the corresponding forecast uncertainty. Case II: input uncertainty was also considered by assuming rain depth bias follows a normal distribution, and integrated with SCEM-UA. Case III: Simulations from two models were combined by the Bayesian model averaging to fully quantify multisource uncertainty effects. Results suggested that, from Case I to II, the containing ratio (percentage of observed streamflow enveloped by 95% confidence interval) obviously increased by an average magnitude of 10% for the study period 2000–2006. Besides, it also found that the width of 95% confidence interval became wider and narrower for Xinanjiang model and TOPMODEL, respectively, from Case I to II. This may indicate that the uncertainty of TOPMODEL results was more remarkable than Xinanjiang model in Case I. By combining results from two models, model structure uncertainty was also considered in Case III. The accuracy of uncertainty bounds further improved with the containing ratio of 95% confidence interval >95%. In addition, the optimized deterministic results from the uncertainty analysis showed that the average Nash–Sutcliffe coefficient increased continually from Case I to II and III (0.82, 0.84 and 0.90, respectively) for the study period. The analysis demonstrated the improvement of modeling accuracy when extra uncertainty sources were also quantified, and this finding also proved the applicability of IBUNE framework in hydrologic modeling.
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Acknowledgements
This work was supported by the National Key Research and Development Program approved by Ministry of Science and Technology of China (2016YFA0601504, 2016YFC0402706), National Natural Science Foundation of China (51509067), China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (2015M580450), Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities of China (2015B00114, 2016B10914), and Open Research Fund Program of State Key Laboratory of Hydrology-Water Resources and Hydraulic Engineering (2015490611).
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B. Li and Y. He have contributed equally.
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Li, B., He, Y. & Ren, L. Multisource hydrologic modeling uncertainty analysis using the IBUNE framework in a humid catchment. Stoch Environ Res Risk Assess 32, 37–50 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00477-017-1424-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00477-017-1424-x