Document Type

Article

Publication Date

9-23-2019

Publication Title

Geoscientific Model Development

Publisher

EGU

Volume

12

Issue

9

First page number:

4115

Last page number:

4131

Abstract

This paper studies how to improve the accuracy of hydrologic models using machine-learning models as post-processors and presents possibilities to reduce the workload to create an accurate hydrologic model by removing the calibration step. It is often challenging to develop an accurate hydrologic model due to the time-consuming model calibration procedure and the nonstationarity of hydrologic data. Our findings show that the errors of hydrologic models are correlated with model inputs. Thus motivated, we propose a modeling-error-learning-based post-processor framework by leveraging this correlation to improve the accuracy of a hydrologic model. The key idea is to predict the differences (errors) between the observed values and the hydrologic model predictions by using machine-learning techniques. To tackle the nonstationarity issue of hydrologic data, a moving-window-based machine-learning approach is proposed to enhance the machine-learning error predictions by identifying the local stationarity of the data using a stationarity measure developed based on the Hilbert–Huang transform. Two hydrologic models, the Precipitation–Runoff Modeling System (PRMS) and the Hydrologic Modeling System (HEC-HMS), are used to evaluate the proposed framework. Two case studies are provided to exhibit the improved performance over the original model using multiple statistical metrics.

Disciplines

Hydraulic Engineering

File Format

pdf

File Size

5.356 KB

Language

English

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

UNLV article access

Search your library

Share

COinS