Theses and Dissertations

Yi Jiang

Issuing Body

Mississippi State University

Advisor

Truax, Dennis D.

Committee Member

Ramirez-Avila, John J.

Committee Member

Gude, Veera Gnaneswar

Committee Member

Martin, James L.

Date of Degree

12-9-2016

Document Type

Dissertation - Open Access

Major

Civil Engineering

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

College

James Worth Bagley College of Engineering

Department

Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering

Abstract

Sensitivity analysis is essential for the hydrologic models to help gain insight into model’s behavior, and assess the model structure and conceptualization. Parameter estimation in the distributed hydrologic models is difficult due to the high-dimensional parameter spaces. Sensitivity analysis identified the influential and non-influential parameters in the modeling process, thus it will benefit the calibration process. This study identified, applied and evaluated two sensitivity analysis methods for the APEX model. The screening methods, the Morris method, and LH-OAT method, were implemented in the experimental site in North Carolina for modeling runoff, sediment loss, TP and DP losses. At the beginning of the application, the run number evaluation was conducted for the Morris method. The result suggested that 2760 runs were sufficient for 45 input parameters to get reliable sensitivity result. Sensitivity result for the five management scenarios in the study site indicated that the Morris method and LH-OAT method provided similar results on the sensitivity of the input parameters, except the difference on the importance of PARM2, PARM8, PARM12, PARM15, PARM20, PARM49, PARM76, PARM81, PARM84, and PARM85. The results for the five management scenarios indicated the very influential parameters were consistent in most cases, such as PARM23, PARM34, and PARM84. The “sensitive” parameters had good overlaps between different scenarios. In addition, little variation was observed in the importance of the sensitive parameters in the different scenarios, such as PARM26. The optimization process with the most influential parameters from sensitivity analysis showed great improvement on the APEX modeling performance in all scenarios by the objective functions, PI1, NSE, and GLUE.

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11668/18632

Comments

APEX||Parameter optimization||Sensitivity analysis

Download

Share

COinS