Published In
Journal of Hydrology
Document Type
Post-Print
Publication Date
6-2-2014
Subjects
Streamflow -- Forecasting, Hydrology -- Data processing, Water quality -- Mathematical models, Bayesian statistical decision theory
Abstract
Uncertainties are an unfortunate yet inevitable part of any forecasting system. Within the context of seasonal hydrologic predictions, these uncertainties can be attributed to three causes: imperfect characterization of initial conditions, an incomplete knowledge of future climate and errors within computational models. This study proposes a method to account for all threes sources of uncertainty, providing a framework to reduce uncertainty and accurately convey persistent predictive uncertainty. In currently available forecast products, only a partial accounting of uncertainty is performed, with the focus primarily on meteorological forcing. For example, the Ensemble Streamflow Prediction (ESP) technique uses meteorological climatology to estimate total uncertainty, thus ignoring initial condition and modeling uncertainty. In order to manage all three sources of uncertainty, this study combines ESP with Ensemble Data Assimilation, to quantify initial condition uncertainty, and Sequential Bayesian Combination, to quantify model errors. This gives a more complete description of seasonal hydrologic forecasting uncertainty. Results from this experiment suggest that the proposed method increases the reliability of probabilistic forecasts, particularly with respect to the tails of the predictive distribution.
DOI
10.1016/j.jhydrol.2014.05.045
Persistent Identifier
http://archives.pdx.edu/ds/psu/11930
Citation Details
DeChant, C.M., Moradkhani, H., Toward a Reliable Prediction of Seasonal Forecast Uncertainty: Addressing Model and Initial Condition Uncertainty with Ensemble Data Assimilation and Sequential Bayesian Combination, Journal of Hydrology (2014), doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.101/j.jhydrol.2014.05.045
Description
NOTICE: This is a PDF file of an unedited manuscript that has been accepted for publication in Journal of Hydrology. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have be made to this work since it was submitted for publication. A definitive version to be published in Journal of Hydrology (2014), doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jhydrol.2014.05.045