Fitting of Hydrologic Models: A Close Look at the Nash–Sutcliffe Index
Publication: Journal of Hydrologic Engineering
Volume 13, Issue 10
Abstract
Quantitative assessments of the degree to which the modeled behavior of a system matches with the observations provide an evaluation of the model’s predictive abilities. In this context, the Nash–Sutcliffe efficiency index is widely used in water resources sector to assess the performance of a hydrologic model. Through a series of results, this technical note demonstrates that this index alone is not adequate in describing the performance of a model. It is shown that relatively poor models can give a high value of the index and vice-versa. Thus, it is advisable to employ the other statistical measures before arriving at a definite conclusion about the performance of a hydrologic model.
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Information & Authors
Information
Published In
Journal of Hydrologic Engineering
Volume 13 • Issue 10 • October 2008
Pages: 981 - 986
Copyright
© 2008 ASCE.
History
Received: Mar 14, 2007
Accepted: Dec 7, 2007
Published online: Oct 1, 2008
Published in print: Oct 2008
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