Brown, Lloyd Louis

Can Exploratory Modeling of Water Scarcity Vulnerabilities and Robustness Be Scenario Neutral?

“…In addition to determining which Gaussian HMM parameters are most important in explaining a particular percentile of shortage, we also use linear and logistic regression to create a response surface Moody & Brown, 2013) that either predicts a particular percentile of shortage as a function of the parameters, or the probability of keeping a particular percentile of shortage below some threshold as a function of the parameters. We display these response surfaces as two-dimensional contour plots of the shortage/probability estimates given values of the two most predictive HMM parameters.…”

“…In this study, we explore how vulnerability assessments performed over competing hypotheses of how future hydrology might evolve dictate which uncertainties are found to most control water shortages for different users in an institutionally complex, multiactor system, and subsequently, which users are found to be most robust. Several studies have compared how robustness ranks of alternative management strategies or multiple water users (i.e., policies and objectives) differ under alternative definitions of robustness (Herman et al, 2015;Giuliani & Castelletti, 2016;Spence & Brown, 2018;McPhail et al, 2018;Hadjimichael, Quinn, Wilson, et al, 2020), or under alternative assumptions about the range and joint distribution of uncertain factors (i.e., the experimental design) (Moody & Brown, 2013;Taner et al, 2019;Reis & Shortridge, 2019). Yet none of these studies has explored if and how the importance of uncertain factors differs under alternative experimental designs.…”