Monte Carlo assessment of uncertainty in the simulated hydrological response to land use change

Abstract

We quantified the uncertainty in hydrological response for a set of land use change scenarios by varying plant parameters within realistic uncertainty bounds in a Monte Carlo analysis. The results show that simulated hydrological fluxes significantly change after the introduction of outwintering suckler cow management, despite the presence of a significant amount of output uncertainty due to uncertainty in the plant parameterisation. The key to a proper uncertainty assessment was to consider the uncertainty in the difference between the scenarios instead of the absolute uncertainty of each single scenario. Additionally, a sensitivity analysis showed that changing soil properties in response to land use change does not result in significantly different results in the scenario analysis.