Probabilistic Forecast and Uncertainty Assessment of Hydrologic Design Values Using Bayesian Theories

ABSTRACT

Researches on hydrologic extreme events have great significance in reducing and avoiding the severe losses and impacts caused by natural disasters. When forecasting hydrologic design values of the hydrologic extreme events of interest by the conventional hydrologic frequency analysis (HFA) model, the results cannot take uncertainties and risks into account. In this article, in order to overcome conventional HFA model's disadvantages and to improve hydrologic design values’ forecast results, an improved HFA model named AM-MCMC-HFA is proposed by employing the AM-MCMC algorithm (adaptive Metropolis-Markov chain Monte Carlo) to HFA process. Differing with conventional HFA model, which is seeking single optimal forecast result, the AM-MCMC-HFA model can not only get the optimal but also the probabilistic forecast results of hydrologic design values. By applying to two obviously different hydrologic series, the performances of the model proposed have been verified. Analysis results show that four factors have great influence on hydrologic design values’ reliability, and also indicate that AM-MCMC-HFA has the ability of assessing the uncertainties of parameters and hydrologic design values. Therefore, by using the AM-MCMC-HFA model, hydrologic designs tasks can be operated more reasonably, and more rational decisions can be made by governmental decision-makers and public in practice.

Key Words:

• natural disasters
• hydrologic frequency analysis
• Bayesian theory
• risk analysis
• uncertainty
• sensitivity

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The authors gratefully acknowledge the helpful review comments and suggestions on an earlier version of the article by the Editor-in Chief/Managing Editor Barry L. Johnson and two anonymous reviewers. This project was supported by the National Natural Science Fund of China (40725010, 40730635), Water Resources Public-welfare Project 200701024 Jiangsu Project Innovation for PhD Candidates, and the Skeleton Young Teachers Program and Excellent Disciplines Leaders in Midlife-Youth Program of Nanjing University.