Comparison of non-parametric and parametric water temperature models on the Nivelle River, France

Water temperature is an important abiotic variable in aquatic habitat studies and may be one of the factors limiting the potential fish habitat (e.g. salmonids) in a stream. Stream water temperatures are modelled using statistical approaches with air temperature and streamflow as exogenous variables in the Nivelle River, southern France. Two different models are used to model mean weekly maximum temperature data: a non-parametric approach, the k-nearest neighbours method (k-NN) and a parametric approach, the periodic autoregressive model with exogenous variables (PARX). The k-NN is a data-driven method, which consists of finding, at each point of interest, a small number of neighbours nearest to this value, and the prediction is estimated based on these neighbours. The PARX model is an extension of commonly-used autoregressive models in which parameters are estimated for each period within the years. Different variants of air temperature and flow are used in the model development. In order to test the performance of these models, a jack-knife technique is used, whereby model goodness of fit is assessed separately for each year. The results indicate that both models give good performances, but the PARX model should be preferred, because of its good estimation of the individual weekly temperatures and its ability to explicitly predict water temperature using exogenous variables.