A Novel Objective Function DYNO for Automatic Multi-variable Calibration and Application to Assess Effects of Velocity versus Temperature Data for 3D Lake Models Calibration

Abstract

Abstract. This study introduced a novel Dynamically Normalized objective function (DYNO) for multi-variable (i.e., temperature and velocity) model calibration problems. DYNO combines the error metrics of multiple variables into a single objective function by dynamically normalizing each variable's error terms using information available during the search. DYNO is proposed to dynamically adjust the weight of the error of each variable hence balancing the calibration to each variable during optimization search. The DYNO is applied to calibrate a tropical hydrodynamic model where temperature and velocity observation data are used for model calibration simultaneously. We also investigated the efficiency of DYNO by comparing the result of using DYNO to results of calibrating to either temperature or velocity observation only. The result indicates that DYNO can balance the calibration in terms of water temperature and velocity and that calibrating to only one variable (e.g., temperature or velocity) cannot guarantee the goodness-of-fit of another variable (e.g., velocity or temperature). Our study suggested that both temperature and velocity measures should be used for hydrodynamic model calibration in real practice. Our example problems were computed with a parallel optimization method PODS but DYNO can also be easily used in serial applications.