Optimization of measurement campaigns for calibration of a conceptual sewer model

Abstract

To simulate hydrological models of combined sewer systems an accurate calibration is indispensable. In addition to all sources of uncertainties in data collection due to the measurement methods itself, it is a key question which data has to be collected to calibrate a hydrological model, how long measurement campaigns should last and where that data has to be collected in a spatial distributed system as it is neither possible nor sensible to measure the complete system characteristics. In this paper we address this question by means of stochastic modelling. Using Monte Carlo Simulation different calibration strategies (selection of measurement sites, selection of rainfall-events) and different calibration parameters (overflow volume, number of overflows) are tested, in order to evaluate the influence on predicting the total overflow volume of the entire system. This methodology is applied in a case study with the aim to calculate the combined sewer overflow (CSO) efficiency. It can be shown that a distributed hydrological model can be calibrated sufficiently when calibration is done on 30% of all existing CSOs based on long-term observation. Event based calibration is limited possible to a limited extend when calibration events are selected carefully as wrong selection of calibration events can result in a complete failure of the calibration exercise.