A hybrid, non-stationary Stochastic Watershed Model (SWM) for uncertain
hydrologic projections under climate change
Abstract
Stochastic Watershed Models (SWMs) are emerging tools in hydrologic
modeling used to propagate uncertainty into model predictions by adding
samples of model error to deterministic simulations. One of the most
promising uses of SWMs is uncertainty propagation for hydrologic
simulations under climate change. However, a core challenge with this
approach is that the predictive uncertainty inferred from hydrologic
model errors in the historical record may not correctly characterize the
error distribution under future climate. For example, the frequency of
physical processes (e.g., snow accumulation and melt, droughts and
hydrologic recessions) may change under climate change, and so too may
the frequency of errors associated with those processes. In this work,
we explore for the first time non-stationarity in hydrologic model
errors under climate change in an idealized experimental design. We fit
one hydrologic model to historical observations, and then fit a second
model to the simulations of the first, treating the first model as the
true hydrologic system. We then force both models with climate change
impacted meteorology and investigate changes to the error distribution
between the models in historical and future periods. We develop a hybrid
machine learning method that maps model input and state variables to
predictive errors, allowing for non-stationary error distributions based
on changes in the frequency of internal state variables. We find that
this procedure provides an internally consistent methodology to overcome
stationarity assumptions in error modeling and offers an important path
forward in developing stochastic hydrologic simulations under climate
change.