Is point uncertain rainfall likely to have a great impact on distributed complex hydrological modeling?

Abstract

Uncertainty analysis has become an important topic in environmental research. Uncertainty in hydrological modeling, in general, has been studied by investigating mainly the influence of the parameter uncertainty on the uncertainty of the simulated outputs. This paper focuses essentially on the impact of point input uncertainty on fully distributed hydrological modeling and proposes an integrated approach to cope with input and parameter uncertainty. The approach uses Bayesian theory in two steps: first, to compute the uncertainty in input forcing data, and second, to compute the hydrological parameter uncertainty and the uncertainties of a lumped-error term that include other sources of errors: response errors and model error. The method is applied with a fully distributed model: WaSiM-ETH. The results show that the methodology proposed here is a valuable tool to assess different sources of uncertainty in hydrological modeling and show the effects of uncertainty in the input forcing when a fully distributed, physically based hydrological model is used. Copyright 2010 by the American Geophysical Union.