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Comparative Study of Three Updating Procedures for Real-Time Flood Forecasting

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Abstract

Accurate real-time flood forecasting is essential for flood control and warning system, reservoir operation and other relevant water resources management activities. The objective of this study is to investigate and compare the capability of three updating procedures, namely autoregressive (AR) model, recursive least-squares (RLS) model and hydrologic uncertainty processor (HUP) in the real-time flood forecasting. The Baiyunshan reservoir basin located in southern China was selected as a case study. These three procedures were employed to update outputs of the established Xinanjiang flood forecasting model. The Nash-Sutcliffe efficiency (NSE) and Relative Error (RE) are used as model evaluation criteria. It is found that all of these three updating procedures significantly improve the accuracy of Xinanjiang model when operating in real-time forecasting mode. Comparison results also indicated that the HUP performed better than the AR and RLS models, while RLS model was slightly superior to AR model. In addition, the HUP implemented in the probabilistic form can quantify the uncertainty of the actual discharge to be forecasted and provide a posterior distribution as well as interval estimation, which offer more useful information than two other deterministic updating procedures. Thus, the HUP updating procedure is more promising and recommended for real-time flood forecasting in practice.

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Acknowledgments

This study is financially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC 51539009, 51379148 and 51190094). The authors would like to thank the editor and anonymous reviewers whose comments and suggestions help to improve the manuscript.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. State Key Laboratory of Water Resources and Hydropower Engineering Science, Wuhan University, Wuhan, 430072, China

    Zhangjun Liu, Shenglian Guo, Dedi Liu & Guang Yang

  2. Bureau of International Cooperation, Science and Technology, Changjiang Water Resources Commission, Wuhan, 430010, China

    Honggang Zhang

Authors
  1. Zhangjun Liu
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  2. Shenglian Guo
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  3. Honggang Zhang
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  4. Dedi Liu
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  5. Guang Yang
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Correspondence to Shenglian Guo.

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Liu, Z., Guo, S., Zhang, H. et al. Comparative Study of Three Updating Procedures for Real-Time Flood Forecasting. Water Resour Manage 30, 2111–2126 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11269-016-1275-0

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11269-016-1275-0

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