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Sensitivity And Uncertainty Analysis Coupled With Automatic Calibration For A Distributed Watershed Model, Misgana K. Muleta, John W. Nicklow

Civil and Environmental Engineering

Distributed watershed models should pass through a careful calibration procedure before they are utilized as a decision making aid in the planning and management of water resources. Although manual approaches are still frequently used for calibration, they are tedious, time consuming, and require experienced personnel. This paper describes an automatic approach for calibrating daily streamflow and daily sediment concentration values estimated by the US Department of Agriculture’s distributed watershed simulation model, Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT). The automatic calibration methodology applies a hierarchy of three techniques, namely screening, parameterization, and parameter sensitivity analysis, at the parameter identification stage of …