Evaluation of the impacts of hydrologic model calibration methods on predictability of ecologically-relevant hydrologic indices

Hernandez‐Suarez, J. Sebastian; Nejadhashemi, A. Pouyan; Kropp, Ian; Abouali, Mohammad; Zhang, Zhen; Deb, Kalyanmoy

doi:10.1016/j.jhydrol.2018.07.056

Cited by 11 publications

(17 citation statements)

References 65 publications

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“…The Soil Moisture Accounting and Routing for Transport (SMART) model used here is an enhancement of the SMARG (Soil Moisture Accounting and Routing with Groundwater) lumped, conceptual rainfall-runoff model developed at National University of Ireland, Galway (Kachroo, 1992), and based on the soil layers concept (O'Connell et al, 1970;Nash and Sutcliffe, 1970). Separate soil layers were introduced to capture the decline with soil depth in the ability of plant roots to extract water for evapotranspiration.…”

Section: Rainfall-runoff Modelmentioning

confidence: 99%

Calibration of hydrological models for ecologically relevant streamflow predictions: a trade-off between fitting well to data and estimating consistent parameter sets?

Hallouin¹,

Bruen²,

O’Loughlin³

2020

Hydrol. Earth Syst. Sci.

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Abstract. The ecological integrity of freshwater ecosystems is intimately linked to natural fluctuations in the river flow regime. In catchments with little human-induced alterations of the flow regime (e.g. abstractions and regulations), existing hydrological models can be used to predict changes in the local flow regime to assess any changes in its rivers' living environment for endemic species. However, hydrological models are traditionally calibrated to give a good general fit to observed hydrographs, e.g. using criteria such as the Nash–Sutcliffe efficiency (NSE) or the Kling–Gupta efficiency (KGE). Much ecological research has shown that aquatic species respond to a range of specific characteristics of the hydrograph, including magnitude, frequency, duration, timing, and the rate of change of flow events. This study investigates the performance of specially developed and tailored criteria formed from combinations of those specific streamflow characteristics (SFCs) found to be ecologically relevant in previous ecohydrological studies. These are compared with the more traditional Kling–Gupta criterion for 33 Irish catchments. A split-sample test with a rolling window is applied to reduce the influence on the conclusions of differences between the calibration and evaluation periods. These tailored criteria are shown to be marginally better suited to predicting the targeted streamflow characteristics; however, traditional criteria are more robust and produce more consistent behavioural parameter sets, suggesting a trade-off between model performance and model parameter consistency when predicting specific streamflow characteristics. Analysis of the fitting to each of 165 streamflow characteristics revealed a general lack of versatility for criteria with a strong focus on low-flow conditions, especially in predicting high-flow conditions. On the other hand, the Kling–Gupta efficiency applied to the square root of flow values performs as well as two sets of tailored criteria across the 165 streamflow characteristics. These findings suggest that traditional composite criteria such as the Kling–Gupta efficiency may still be preferable over tailored criteria for the prediction of streamflow characteristics, when robustness and consistency are important.

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Section: Rainfall-runoff Modelmentioning

confidence: 99%

Calibration of hydrological models for ecologically relevant streamflow predictions: a trade-off between fitting well to data and estimating consistent parameter sets?

Hallouin¹,

Bruen²,

O’Loughlin³

2020

Hydrol. Earth Syst. Sci.

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“…This algorithm is an extension of the NSGA-III algorithm [80], which is a population-based method based on reference directions, non-domination sorting, and evolutionary operators (i.e., recombination and mutation) for identifying Pareto-optimal solutions. It is worth mentioning that these algorithms have been successfully applied in water resources and crop modeling problems [81][82][83]. The U-NSGA-III algorithm was implemented in python 3.7 using the pymoo library [84].…”

Section: Multi-objective Optimizationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Multidimensional Aspects of Sustainable Biofuel Feedstock Production

et al. 2021

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Bioenergy is becoming increasingly relevant as an alternative to fossil fuels. Various bioenergy feedstocks are suggested as environmentally friendly solutions due to their positive impact on stream health and ability to sequester carbon, but most evaluations for bioenergy feedstocks have not evaluated the implications of bioenergy crop production holistically to date. Through the application of multi-objective optimization on 10 bioenergy feedstock rotations in a Michigan watershed, a Pareto front is searched to identify optimal trade-off solutions for three objective functions representing stream health, environmental emissions/carbon footprint, and economic feasibility. Various multi-criteria decision-making techniques are then applied to the resulting Pareto front to select a set of most-preferred trade-off solutions, which are compared to optimal solutions from each individual objective function. The most-preferred trade-off solutions indicate that a diverse mix of rotations are necessary to optimize all three objectives, whereas the individually optimal solutions do not consider a diverse range of feedstocks, thereby making the proposed multi-objective treatment an important and pragmatic strategy.

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“…How were the 14 combinations of the 7-year periods chosen? P11 L 4: There are more studies looking at the effect of objective functions on the prediction of streamflow characteristics than those of Vis et al (2015), Kiesel et al (2017), andPool et al (2017) (two examples are Hernandez-Suarez et al, 2018;Zhang et al, 2016) Discussion: About half of the discussion is about the implication of the results for climate change studies and studies on the prediction in ungauged basins. However, climate change and prediction in ungauged basins are not directly addressed in this study.…”

Section: Specific Commentsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Review comments to Hallouin et al.

Anonymous

2019

Preprint

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Review of the manuscript "Calibration of hydrological models for ecologicallyrelevant streamflow predictions: a trade-off between performance and consistency" by Hallouin et al.Hydrological models are an important tool for evaluating the effect of altered runoff regimes on the ecological integrity of a freshwater system. However, the accurate prediction of multiple specific hydrograph aspects (SFCs) from a single streamflow simulation is challenging. Hallouin et al. address this challenge by evaluating model simulations from calibrations with different objective functions. The selected objective

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Evaluation of the impacts of hydrologic model calibration methods on predictability of ecologically-relevant hydrologic indices

Cited by 11 publications

References 65 publications

Calibration of hydrological models for ecologically relevant streamflow predictions: a trade-off between fitting well to data and estimating consistent parameter sets?

Calibration of hydrological models for ecologically relevant streamflow predictions: a trade-off between fitting well to data and estimating consistent parameter sets?

Multidimensional Aspects of Sustainable Biofuel Feedstock Production

Review comments to Hallouin et al.

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