Reducing uncertainties in urban drainage models by explicitly accounting for timing errors in objective functions

Abstract

ABSTRACT Traditional hydrological objective functions may penalize models that reproduce hydrograph shapes well, but with some shift in time; especially for urban catchments with a fast hydrological response. Hydrograph timing is not always critical, so this paper investigates alternative objective functions (based on the Hydrograph Matching Algorithm) that try to mimic visual hydrograph comparison. A modified version of the Generalized Likelihood Uncertainty Estimation is proposed to compare regular objective functions with those that account for timing errors. This is applied to 2-year calibration and validation data sets from an urban catchment. Results show that such objective functions provide equally reliable model predictions (they envelop the same fraction of observations), but with more precision, i.e. smaller estimated uncertainty of model predictions. Additionally, identifiability of some model parameters improved. Therefore objective functions based on the Hydrograph Matching Algorithm can be useful to reduce uncertainties in urban drainage modelling.