Synthetic simulation of spatially-correlated streamflows:
Weighted-modified Fractional Gaussian Noise
Abstract
Stochastic methods have been typically used for the design and
operations of hydraulic infrastructure. They allow decision makers to
evaluate existing or new infrastructure under different possible
scenarios, giving them the flexibility and tools needed in decision
making. In this paper, we present a novel stochastic streamflow
simulation approach able to replicate both temporal and spatial
dependencies from the original data in a multi-site basin context. The
proposed model is a multi-site extension of the modified Fractional
Gaussian Noise (mFGN) model which is well-known to be efficient to
maintain periodic correlation for several time lags, but presents
shortcomings in preserving the spatial correlation. Our method, called
Weighted-mFGN (WmFGN), incorporates spatial dependency into streamflows
simulated with mFGN by relying on the Cholesky decomposition of the
spatial correlation matrix of the historical streamflow records. As the
order in which the decomposition steps are performed (temporal then
spatial, or vice-versa) affects the performance in terms of preserving
the temporal and spatial correlation, our method searches for an optimal
convex combination of the resulting correlation matrices. The result is
a Pareto-curve that indicates the optimal weights of the convex
combination depending on the importance given by the user to spatial and
temporal correlations. The model is applied to Bio-bio River basin
(Chile), where the results show that the WmFGN maintains the qualities
of the single-site mFGN, while significantly improving spatial
correlation.