Joint Optimization of Conceptual Rainfall-Runoff Model Parameters and Weights Attributed to Meteorological Stations

Adam P. Piotrowski (), Marzena Osuch and Jarosław J. Napiorkowski
Additional contact information
Adam P. Piotrowski: Polish Academy of Sciences
Marzena Osuch: Polish Academy of Sciences
Jarosław J. Napiorkowski: Polish Academy of Sciences

Water Resources Management: An International Journal, Published for the European Water Resources Association (EWRA), 2019, vol. 33, issue 13, No 6, 4509-4524

Abstract: Abstract Conceptual lumped rainfall-runoff models are frequently used for various environmental problems. To put them into practice, both the model calibration method and data series of the area-averaged precipitation and air temperature are needed. In the case when data from more than one measurement station are available, first the catchment-averaged meteorological data series are usually obtained by some method, and then they are used for calibration of a lumped rainfall-runoff model. However, various optimization methods could easily be applied to simultaneously calibrate both the aggregation weights attributed to various meteorological stations to obtain a lumped meteorological data series and the rainfall-runoff model parameters. This increases the problem dimensionality but allows the optimization procedure to choose the data that are most important for the rainfall-runoff process in a particular catchment, without a priori assumptions. We test the idea using two conceptual models, HBV and GR4J, and three mutually different, relatively recently proposed Evolutionary Computation and Swarm Intelligence optimization algorithms, that are applied to three catchments located in Poland and northwestern USA. We consider two cases: with and without the model error correction applied to the rainfall-runoff models. It is shown that for the calibration period, joint optimization of the weights used to aggregate the meteorological data and the parameters of the rainfall-runoff model improves the results. However, the results for the validation period are inconclusive and depend on the model, error correction, optimization algorithm, and catchment.

Keywords: Lumped conceptual rainfall-runoff modelling; Mean aerial precipitation; HBV; GR4J; Thiessen polygons; Model calibration (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s11269-019-02368-8 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:waterr:v:33:y:2019:i:13:d:10.1007_s11269-019-02368-8

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/11269

DOI: 10.1007/s11269-019-02368-8

Access Statistics for this article

Water Resources Management: An International Journal, Published for the European Water Resources Association (EWRA) is currently edited by G. Tsakiris

More articles in Water Resources Management: An International Journal, Published for the European Water Resources Association (EWRA) from Springer, European Water Resources Association (EWRA)
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().