Decision Criteria for using Stochastic Hydrology

A decision-theoretic plan is presented that provides insight into questions of interest to the system planner about to embark on a study which uses stochastic hydrology. The plan considers and integrates three broad areas: (1) the collection, interpretation, and adjustment of the data bank which is required to initiate stochastic modeling; (2) the investigation of existing, and development of new, stochastic hydrology models; and (3) the construction of water resource simulation procedures whose outputs serve as vehicles by which the importance of the other necessary tasks can be determined. The overall plan has component tasks which correspond directly to the design steps of the system planner. Emphasis is laid upon data management. A scheme for multivariate data fill-in, based on variance reduction criteria, is presented.