Assessment of Rainfall-Sediment Yield-Runoff Prediction Uncertainty Using a Multi-objective Optimization Method

In hydrologic modeling, prediction uncertainty generally stems from various uncertainty sources associated with model structure, data, and parameters, etc. This study aims to assess the parameter uncertainty effect on hydrologic prediction results. For this objective, a distributed rainfall-sediment yield-runoff model, which consists of rainfall-runoff module for simulation of surface and subsurface flows and sediment yield module based on unit stream power theory, was applied to the mesoscale mountainous area (Cheoncheon catchment; 289.9 ). For parameter uncertainty evaluation, the model was calibrated by a multi-objective optimization algorithm (MOSCEM) with two different objective functions (RMSE and HMLE) and Pareto optimal solutions of each case were then estimated. In Case I, the rainfall-runoff module was calibrated to investigate the effect of parameter uncertainty on hydrograph reproduction whereas in Case II, sediment yield module was calibrated to show the propagation of parameter uncertainty into sedigraph estimation. Additionally, in Case III, all parameters of both modules were simultaneously calibrated in order to take account of prediction uncertainty in rainfall-sediment yield-runoff modeling. The results showed that hydrograph prediction uncertainty of Case I was observed over the low-flow periods while the sedigraph of high-flow periods was sensitive to uncertainty of the sediment yield module parameters in Case II. In Case III, prediction uncertainty ranges of both hydrograph and sedigraph were larger than the other cases. Furthermore, prediction uncertainty in terms of spatial distribution of erosion and deposition drastically varied with the applied model parameters for all cases.