×K14. Understanding and quantifying uncertainties in hydrologic and environmental models

The foremost challenge in natural resource management today is to make predictions in a changing environment for applications such as ecosystem management, flood warning, and water allocation. The difficulty of this task is amplified when considering the uncertainty associated with observations, models, and the future climate. To this end, uncertainty and sensitivity analysis methods are routinely deployed in environmental modelling applications. However, rapidly changing observational technologies, computational power, modelling platforms, and our scientific understanding of earth systems complicate the ongoing use of traditional approaches.

This session welcomes contributions aimed at identifying the sources, challenges, approaches and novel solutions related to uncertainty of hydrologic and environmental models. Abstracts and papers on the following topics are particularly welcome:

• Strategies for attributing the sources of uncertainty in model calibrations and simulations
• Methods for identifying and quantifying uncertainty in observations, especially new observing technologies such as satellite remote sensing
• Methods for quantifying and representing uncertainty in the future climate projections and how these can inform the assessments of climate change impact on hydrological and ecological systems
• Strategies for more robust sensitivity/uncertainty analysis in changing environments
• Applications that couple hydro-climatic and ecological system processes, which takes into account multiple sources of uncertainties and their propagation
• Case studies where SA/UA is used operationally for improved hydrologic and hydraulic forecasts or predictions

Key topics: Uncertainty analysis, Sensitivity analysis, Observation error, Model error