Mahyar Shafii

Optimizing hydrological consistency by incorporating hydrological signatures into model calibration objectives

The simulated outcome of a calibrated hydrologic model should be hydrologically consistent with the measured response data. Hydrologic modelers typically calibrate models to optimize residual-based goodness-of-fit measures, e.g., the Nash-Sutcliffe efficiency measure, and then evaluate the obtained results with respect to hydrological signatures, e.g., the flow duration curve indices. The literature indicates that the consideration of a large number of hydrologic signatures has not been addressed in a full multiobjective optimization context. This research develops a model calibration methodology to achieve hydrological consistency using goodness-of-fit measures, many hydrological signatures, as well as a level of acceptability for each signature. The proposed framework relies on a scoring method that transforms any hydrological signature to a calibration objective. These scores are used to develop the hydrological consistency metric, which is maximized to obtain hydrologically consistent parameter sets during calibration. This consistency metric is implemented in different signature-based calibration formulations that adapt the sampling according to hydrologic signature values. These formulations are compared with the traditional formulations found in the literature for seven case studies. The results reveal that Pareto dominance-based multiobjective optimization yields the highest level of consistency among all formulations. Furthermore, it is found that the choice of optimization algorithms does not affect the findings of this research.

Uncertainty-based multi-criteria calibration of rainfall-runoff models: a comparative study

This study compares formal Bayesian inference to the informal generalized likelihood uncertainty estimation (GLUE) approach for uncertainty-based calibration of rainfall-runoff models in a multi-criteria context. Bayesian inference is accomplished through Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling based on an auto-regressive multi-criteria likelihood formulation. Non-converged MCMC sampling is also considered as an alternative method. These methods are compared along multiple comparative measures calculated over the calibration and validation periods of two case studies. Results demonstrate that there can be considerable differences in hydrograph prediction intervals generated by formal and informal strategies for uncertainty-based multi-criteria calibration. Also, the formal approach generates definitely preferable validation period results compared to GLUE (i.e., tighter prediction intervals that show higher reliability) considering identical computational budgets. Moreover, non-converged MCMC (based on the standard Gelman–Rubin metric) performance is reasonably consistent with those given by a formal and fully-converged Bayesian approach even though fully-converged results requires significantly larger number of samples (model evaluations) for the two case studies. Therefore, research to define alternative and more practical convergence criteria for MCMC applications to computationally intensive hydrologic models may be warranted.

A diagnostic approach to constraining flow partitioning in hydrologic models using a multiobjective optimization framework

© American Geophysical Union: Shafii, M., Basu, N., Craig, J. R., Schiff, S. L., & Van Cappellen, P. (2017). A diagnostic approach to constraining flow partitioning in hydrologic models using a multiobjective optimization framework. Water Resources Research, 53(4), 3279–3301. https://doi.org/10.1002/2016WR019736