An uncertainty partition approach for inferring interactive hydrologic risks

Abstract. Extensive uncertainties exist in hydrologic risk analysis. Particularly for interdependent hydrometeorological extremes, the random features in individual variables and their dependence structures may lead to bias and uncertainty in future risk inferences. In this study, an iterative factorial copula (IFC) approach is proposed to quantify parameter uncertainties and further reveal their contributions to predictive uncertainties in risk inferences. Specifically, an iterative factorial analysis (IFA) approach is developed to diminish the effect of the sample size and provide reliable characterization for parameters' contributions to the resulting risk inferences. The proposed approach is applied to multivariate flood risk inference for the Wei River basin to demonstrate the applicability of IFC for tracking the major contributors to resulting uncertainty in a multivariate risk analysis framework. In detail, the multivariate risk model associated with flood peak and volume will be established and further introduced into the proposed iterative factorial analysis framework to reveal the individual and interactive effects of parameter uncertainties on the predictive uncertainties in the resulting risk inferences. The results suggest that uncertainties in risk inferences would mainly be attributed to some parameters of the marginal distributions, while the parameter of the dependence structure (i.e. copula function) would not produce noticeable effects. Moreover, compared with traditional factorial analysis (FA), the proposed IFA approach would produce a more reliable visualization for parameters' impacts on risk inferences, while the traditional FA would remarkably overestimate the contribution of parameters' interaction to the failure probability in AND (i.e. all variables would exceed the corresponding thresholds) and at the same time underestimate the contribution of parameters' interaction to the failure probabilities in OR (i.e. one variable would exceed its corresponding threshold) and Kendall (i.e. the correlated variables would exceed a critical multivariate threshold).