Navigating through extreme flood simulations with intelligently chosen parameter sets

The quantification of extreme floods and associated return periods remains to be a challenge for flood hazard management and is particularly important for applications where the full hydrograph shape is required (e.g., for reservoir management). One way of deriving such estimates is by employing a comprehensive hydrological simulation framework, including a weather generator, to simulate a large set of flood hydrographs. In such a setting, the estimation uncertainties originate from the hydrological model, but also from the climate variability. While the uncertainty from the hydrological model can be described with common methods of uncertainty estimation in hydrology (in particular related to model parameters), the uncertainties from climate variability can only be represented with repeated realizations of meteorological scenarios. These scenarios can be generated with the help of the selected weather generator(s), which are capable of providing numerous and continuous long time series. Such generated meteorological scenarios are then used as input for a hydrological model to simulate a large sample of extreme floods, from which return periods can be computed based on ranking.

In such a simulation framework, many thousands of possible combinations of meteorological scenarios and of hydrological model parameter sets may be generated. However, these simulations are required at a high temporal resolution (hourly), needed for the simulation of extreme floods and for determining infrequent floods of a return period equal to or lower than 1000 years. Accordingly, due to computational constraints related to any hydrological model, one often needs to preselect meteorological scenarios and representative model parameter sets to be used within the simulation framework. Thus, some kind of an intelligent parameter selection for deriving the uncertainty ranges of extreme model simulations for such rare events would be very beneficial but is currently missing.

Here we present results from an experimental study where we tested three different methods of selecting a small number of representative parameter sets for a Swiss catchment. We used 100 realizations of 100 years of synthetic precipitation-streamflow data. We particularly explored the reliability of the extreme flood uncertainty intervals derived from the reduced parameter set ensemble (consisting of only three representative parameter sets) compared to the full range of 100 parameter sets available. Our results demonstrated that the proposed methods are efficient for deriving uncertainty intervals for extreme floods. These findings are promising for the simulation of extreme floods in comparable simulation frameworks for hydrological risk assessment.