Establishing a connection between hydrologic model parameters and physical catchment signatures for improved hierarchical Bayesian modeling in ungauged catchments
Abstract
In an effort to improve hydrologic analysis in areas with limited data, hydrologists often seek to link catchments where little to no data collection occurs to catchments that are gauged. Various metrics and methods have been proposed to identify such relationships, in the hope that "surrogate" catchments might provide information for those catchments that are hydrologically similar. In this study we present a statistical analysis of over 150 catchments located in southeast Australia to examine the relationship between a hydrological model and certain catchment metrics. A conceptual rainfall-runoff model is optimized for each of the catchments and hierarchical clustering is performed to link catchments based on their calibrated model parameters. Clustering has been used in recent hydrologic studies but catchments are often clustered based on physical characteristics alone. Usually there is little evidence to suggest that such "surrogate" data approaches provide sufficiently similar model predictions. Beginning with model parameters and working backwards, we hope to establish if there is a relationship between the model parameters and physical characteristics for improved model predictions in the ungauged catchment. To analyze relationships, permutational multivariate analysis of variance tests are used that suggest which hydrologic metrics are most appropriate for discriminating between calibrated catchment clusters. Additional analysis is performed to determine which cluster pairs show significant differences for various metrics. We further examine the extent to which these results may be insightful for a hierarchical Bayesian modeling approach that is aimed at generating model predictions at an ungauged site. The method, known as Bayes Empirical Bayes (BEB) works to pool information from similar catchments to generate informed probability distributions for each model parameter at a data-limited catchment of interest. We demonstrate the effect of selecting appropriately similar catchments when transferring model parameters to ungauged sites.
- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2012
- Bibcode:
- 2012AGUFM.H13A1304M
- Keywords:
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- 1847 HYDROLOGY / Modeling;
- 1874 HYDROLOGY / Ungaged basins;
- 1800 Hydrology