The role of hydrograph indices in parameter estimation of rainfall–runoff models

By Eylon Shamir, B. Imam, Efrat Morin, Hoshin V. Gupta, Soroosh Sorooshian. 2005

57 citations recorded by the source corpus.

A reliable prediction of hydrologic models, among other things, requires a set of plausible parameters that correspond with physiographic properties of the basin. This study proposes a parameter estimation approach, which is based on extracting, through hydrograph diagnoses, information in the form of indices that carry intrinsic properties of a basin. This concept is demonstrated by introducing two indices that describe the shape of a streamflow hydrograph in an integrated manner. Nineteen mid‐size (223–4790 km2) perennial headwater basins with a long record of streamflow data were selected to evaluate the ability of these indices to capture basin response characteristics. An examination of the utility of the proposed indices in parameter estimation is conducted for a five‐parameter hydrologic model using data from the Leaf River, located in Fort Collins, Mississippi. It is shown that constraining the parameter estimation by selecting only those parameters that result in model output which maintains the indices as found in the historical data can improve the reliability of model predictions. These improvements were manifested in (a) improvement of the prediction of low and high flow, (b) improvement of the overall total biases, and (c) maintenance of the hydrograph's shape for both long‐term and short‐term predictions. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Subfields: Ecology, Global and Planetary Change, Water Science and Technology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/85d0285c704d38db77963d8374628d3926f31688

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Ecology

In Global and Planetary Change

In Water Science and Technology

Citations in the corpus

The stationarity paradigm revisited: Hypothesis testing using diagnostics, summary metrics, and DREAM(ABC) (2015, background): “…[Yadav et al., 2007], and two other fitting parameters of the flow duration curve (FDC) [Vrugt and Sadegh, 2013], rising and declining limb density [Shamir et al., 2005], high and low flow pulse count and duration, rise and fall rate, mean, median, coefficient of variation, skewness, and the…”
Toward diagnostic model calibration and evaluation: Approximate Bayesian computation (2013, background): “Two related shape descriptors, the rising and declining limb density [Shamir et al., 2005] could prove particularly useful in this context, and are easily integrated in the ABC framework presented herein.”
Application of temporal streamflow descriptors in hydrologic model parameter estimation (2005, background): “Developed by Morin et al. [2002] and later studied as a streamflow descriptor by Shamir [2003] and Shamir et al. [2005] , the rising limb density descriptor represents the shape and the level of smoothness of a given hydrograph, while being insensitive to the magnitude and timing of any single time”