Calibration and Reliability in Groundwater Modelling: From Uncertainty to Decision Making (Proceedings of ModelCARE’2005, The Hague, The Netherlands, June 2005). IAHS Publ. 304, 2006. pp.93–99.

On the use of Pareto optimization for multi-criteria calibration of hydrological models

Henrik Madsen1 & Soon-Thiam Khu2

1 DHI Water & Environment, Agern Allé 5, DK-2970 Hørsholm, Denmark

hem@dhi.dk

2 Centre for Water Systems, School of Engineering, Computer Science and Mathematics, University of Exeter, Harrison Building, North Park Road, Exeter EX4 4QF, UK

Abstract The calibration of distributed and integrated hydrological models is formulated as a general multi-objective optimization problem that utilises multiple sources of information in a consistent way. This formulation allows a comprehensive evaluation of the trade-off between different calibration objectives and an elaborate comparison of different model structures. It is a natural solution and extension to the weighted nonlinear least squares regression problem, and it allows the modeller or decision-maker to choose (or weight) solutions at a later stage according to the specific model application being considered. The proposed framework is illustrated for calibration of two MIKE SHE models of different complexity for the same catchment.

Keywords calibration; MIKE SHE; multiple objectives; optimization problem; Pareto solutions