Ensemble Simulation From Multiple Data Sources In A Spatially Distributed Hydrological Model Of The Rijnland Water System In The Netherlands

Abstract

Data for water management is increasingly easy to access, it has finer spatial and temporal resolution, and it is available from various sources. Precipitation data can be obtained from meteorological stations, radar, satellites and weather models. Land use data is also available from different satellite products and different providers. The various sources of data may confirm each other or give very different values in space and time. However, from these various data sources, it can often not be judged beforehand that one data is correct and others are wrong. Each source has its own value for a particular purpose. The Rijnland area in the Netherlands is one of the areas for which various data sources are available. Data sources that are researched in this paper are precipitation from rain gauges and radar, and three different land use maps. Various sources of data are used as input to the hydrological model (SIMGRO) of the water system to produce different discharge model output. Each run provides a member of the ensemble simulation which are combined to improve prediction of discharge from the catchment. It is shown that even simple averaging allows for increasing the model accuracy. Acknowledgement: This research is part of the EU FP7 MyWater research project. http://www.mywater-fp7.e