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Uncertainty in Calibration of Variable Infiltration Capacity Model

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Hydrology in a Changing World

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Abstract

Hydrological models were developed to assess the impacts of climate change and to analyse, understand and examine solutions for sustainable water management in order to back the decision makers and hydrologists. It has been recognized that the current and future water challenges vary from the impacts of economic and population growth, floods, droughts or the melting of the glaciers. Hence, there is the need of the hour to adopt efficient hydrological models and understand the hydrological processes to provide sustainable solutions for water resources management. However, there are different sources of uncertainty associated with the hydrological simulation, such as inaccurate model input or input uncertainty, error associated with the model structure or the parametric uncertainty. The study examines a case study for the Mahanadi river basin of the Indian sub-continent to model uncertainty springing from calibration parameters of the Variable Infiltration Capacity (VIC) macroscale hydrological model. The VIC parameters are calibrated and validated at three gauging stations, namely, Tikarapara, Kantamal and Sundergarh for the years 2003–2007 and 2009–2011 respectively. It is demonstrated from the case study that the calibration parameters must be tuned well so as to match the observed discharge with the simulated discharge thereby eliminating or reducing the parametric uncertainty.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Civil Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, India

    Ankita Pradhan & J. Indu

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  1. Ankita Pradhan
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  1. Hydrological Processes, National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research, Christchurch, New Zealand

    Shailesh Kumar Singh

  2. Department of Civil Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Delhi, New Delhi, India

    C.T. Dhanya

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Pradhan, A., Indu, J. (2019). Uncertainty in Calibration of Variable Infiltration Capacity Model. In: Singh, S., Dhanya, C. (eds) Hydrology in a Changing World. Springer Water. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02197-9_4

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