Uncertainty Analysis and Risk Assessment of DO Concentrations in the Buffalo River Using the Perturbance Moments Method
Publication: Journal of Hydrologic Engineering
Volume 19, Issue 12
Abstract
A three-point approximation method, the perturbance moments method (PMM), is applied to quantify the uncertainty of predicted dissolved oxygen (DO) concentrations in the Buffalo River that arise from data variability and parameter uncertainty. A risk assessment is then conducted to systematically compute the probability of exceeding a predetermined water quality standard. Numerical investigations reveal that the overall uncertainty of the output DO concentrations does not necessarily equal the sum of the uncertainties of all individual variables or parameters of interest. Therefore, different sources of uncertainty can have compensative or additive effects on the overall uncertainty of output DO concentrations. In a particular case study of the Buffalo River, the variability of measured concentrations was demonstrated to have the largest influence on the overall uncertainty of predicted DO concentrations. Notably, data with a higher collection frequency should have a smaller uncertainty, and therefore a smaller variability in the expected values, and so contribute less to the magnitude of the standard deviation of the output DO concentrations. The effective risk that DO concentrations exceed the selected standard over time is evaluated. The effective risk that the DO concentration drops below the selected standard is relatively high in a higher-temperature season.
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Acknowledgments
The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their useful comments to help improve the quality of this manuscript. The authors greatly appreciate Dr. Irvine’s assistance with water quality and hydrodynamic data of the Buffalo River. The authors would also like to thank the U.S. National Science Foundation for financially supporting this research under Contract No. NSF EAR-0748787. Assistance with figures and tables from graduate students L.-C. Lee and Y. Chu at National Taiwan University is greatly appreciated.
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Published In
Journal of Hydrologic Engineering
Volume 19 • Issue 12 • December 2014
Copyright
© 2014 American Society of Civil Engineers.
History
Received: Feb 6, 2013
Accepted: Feb 16, 2014
Published online: Feb 18, 2014
Published in print: Dec 1, 2014
Discussion open until: Dec 16, 2014
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