Assessment of data and parameter uncertainties in integrated water-quality model

Abstract

In integrated urban drainage water quality models, due to the fact that integrated approaches are basically a cascade of sub-models (simulating sewer system, wastewater treatment plant and receiving water body), uncertainty produced in one sub-model propagates to the following ones depending on the model structure, the estimation of parameters and the availability and uncertainty of measurements in the different parts of the system. Uncertainty basically propagates throughout a chain of models in which simulation output from upstream models is transferred to the downstream ones as input. The overall uncertainty can differ from the simple sum of uncertainties generated in each sub-model, depending on well-known uncertainty accumulation problems. The present paper aims to study the uncertainty propagation throughout an integrated urban water-quality model. At this scope, a parsimonious bespoke integrated model has been used allowing analysis of the combinative effect between different sub-models. Particularly, the data and parameter uncertainty have been assessed and compared by means of the variance decomposition concept. The integrated model and the methodology for the uncertainty decomposition have been applied to a complex integrated catchment: the Nocella basin (Italy). The results show that uncertainty contribution due to the model structure is higher with respect to the other sources of uncertainty.

Impacts of recent drought and warm years on water resources and electricity supply worldwide

“…In addition to the impacts of uncertainties related to the various individual models, the use of a cascade of models (VIC hydrological model-routing model-RBM water temperature model-hydropower model and thermoelectric power model) may result also in a propagation of uncertainties (e.g. Freni et al 2011, Pappenberger et al 2012. We assessed the impacts of uncertainties in simulations of streamflow and water temperature on a selection of hydropower and thermoelectric power plants by comparing usable power plant capacity based on the simulations of streamflow and water temperature with values calculated based on observed streamflow and water temperature records of a nearby monitoring station for 1981-2010 (supplementary section 2.3).…”

A bibliometric analysis of the research on Sponge City: Current situation and future development direction

“…SC need to collect, monitor and share data in real time (Nguyen et al, 2020). Large amounts of data are generated and shared across regions, departments and facilities, with uncertain quality (Freni et al, 2011;Kleidorfer et al, 2009;Li, Guo, et al, 2019).…”

A Systematic Literature Mining of Sponge City: Trends, Foci and Challenges Standing Ahead

“…Big amounts of data are generated and exchanged between departments, devices and regions. Some of the data exchanged are highly uncertain [20,[105][106][107]. A typical case study is from Thorndahl et al [108], who tried to simulate various types of flood events both historically and in real-time.…”

“…Many papers pointed out that information technology has become a requisite part of municipal water management systems [73,[109][110][111]. Many Content I, II, IV, VI, VIII papers are data-driven studies, such as application of weather radar data [108,112], urban data integration planning or database [20,113], urban storm water data processing [114], assessment of data and parameter uncertainties [77,[105][106][107]. Some outstanding keywords in Figure 8 represent the focus of information technology, such as "real time control", "simulation", "uncertainty".…”