Behavioral modeling in hydrology
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In hydrology, behavioral modeling is a modeling approach that focuses on the dynamic behavior of environmental systems resulting from coupled biotic and abiotic processes, feedback and evolutionary mechanisms. The system behavior includes both, the system structure and the system response to input driving forces. The response is conditioned by the structure and in turn conditions the evolution of the structure. Structure refers to the spatial or temporal arrangement of mass (biotic or abiotic) or energy within the system, the response refers to a change of these quantities in time or in space. Behavior is observed at a certain moment, a certain place and a certain scale, i.e. at a given point of the time-space-scale domain. Part of the system behavior is unobserved.
The behavioral modeling approach makes the main assumption that every system, given its environment, has a most probable behaviour. This most probable behavior can be either determined directly based on observable system characteristics and expert knowledge or, the most frequent case, has to be inferred from the available information and a likelihood function that encodes the probability of some assumed behaviors.
This modeling approach has been introduced recently by Sivapalan et al. (2006) in watershed hydrology to create a unifying framework for hydrologic prediction and ultimately for all environmental modelers concerned with prediction of environmental processes at the watershed scale.
[edit] See also
[edit] References
- Sivapalan, M., et al. (2006), Behavioural modelling - A new approach for hydrologic prediction, paper presented at the workshop Preferential flow and transport processes in soil, November 4-9, 2006, Ascona,Switzerland.
