A Spatially Consistent Bias Correction Technique for Distributed
Streamflow Modeling
Abstract
Planning for hydropower, water resources management, and climate change
adaptation requires statistically unbiased hydrologic predictions.
However, all hydrologic models contain systematic errors, e.g.,
incorrect mathematical representations of physical processes and effects
of uncertainties in data sources. Statistical post-processing, or bias
correction, is often used to reduce the effects of these systematic
errors in model outputs. A large number of techniques for performing
bias correction has been developed, primarily in the context of
correcting statistical properties of independent locations. However,
when bias correcting streamflow predictions within the same stream
network, this assumption of spatial independence breaks down.
Independently bias correcting locations from the headwaters to the mouth
of a river system destroys the spatial consistency of the streamflow
across a river network. We describe work toward maintaining spatial
consistency in streamflow bias correction using a number of locations in
the western United States. We simulate the hydrology of the Columbia
River in the Pacific Northwestern United States, a river system that
spans a number of hydroclimatic and flow regimes that contains a large
number of flow gages. We develop a mapping from the modeled output at
the gages with flow observations, which we use as the basis for training
a machine learning (ML) model to perform the site-specific bias
correction. We then apply the ML model to local streamflow contributions
for each river segment, including river segments without flow
observations. Finally, we combine the local bias corrections across the
stream network, to create accumulated bias-corrected streamflow time
series that are spatially-consistent across the stream network. We
compare our method against several commonly used bias correction
techniques to evaluate both model performance and spatial consistency.