Journal
ENVIRONMENTAL MODELLING & SOFTWARE
Volume 95, Issue -, Pages 115-131Publisher
ELSEVIER SCI LTD
DOI: 10.1016/j.envsoft.2017.03.031
Keywords
Sensitivity analysis; Perturbation scale; VARS; Environmental modelling; MESH; SWAT; HydroGeoSphere
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Funding
- University of Saskatchewan's Global Institute for Water Security
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This paper investigates the commonly overlooked sensitivity of sensitivity analysis (SA) to what we refer to as parameter perturbation scale, which can be defined as a prescribed size of the sensitivityrelated neighbourhood around any point in the parameter space (analogous to step size Dx for numerical estimation of derivatives). We discuss that perturbation scale is inherent to any (local and global) SA approach, and explain how derivative-based SA approaches (e.g., method of Morris) focus on small-scale perturbations, while variance-based approaches (e.g., method of Sobol) focus on large-scale perturbations. We employ a novel variogram-based approach, called Variogram Analysis of Response Surfaces (VARS), which bridges derivative-and variance-based approaches. Our analyses with different real-world environmental models demonstrate significant implications of subjectivity in the perturbation-scale choice and the need for strategies to address these implications. It is further shown how VARS can uniquely characterize the perturbation-scale dependency and generate sensitivity measures that encompass all sensitivity-related information across the full spectrum of perturbation scales. (C) 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
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