Insights into sensitivity analysis of Earth and environmental systems models: On the impact of parameter perturbation scale |
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| Affiliation: | 1. Global Institute for Water Security, School of Environment and sustainability, University of Saskatchewan, Canada;2. Department of Civil, Environmental, and Geological Engineering, University of Saskatchewan, Canada;1. Department of Business Management, Universidad Loyola Andalucía, Campus de Córdoba, Córdoba, Spain;2. Department of Quantitative Methods, Universidad Loyola Andalucía, Campus de Córdoba, Córdoba, Spain;1. Ecohydrology Research Group, Water Institute and Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario N2L 3G1, Canada;2. School of Earth and Environment, University of Leeds, Leeds LS2 9JT, United Kingdom;3. Department of Marine Biology, Charney School of Marine Sciences, University of Haifa, Mt Carmel, Haifa, Israel;1. School of GeoSciences, University of Edinburgh, King’s Buildings, West Mains Road, Edinburgh, EH9 3JN, United Kingdom;2. Centre for Hydrology, University of Saskatchewan, 117 Science Place, Saskatoon, SK, S7N 5C8, Canada |
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| Abstract: | This paper investigates the commonly overlooked “sensitivity” of sensitivity analysis (SA) to what we refer to as parameter “perturbation scale”, which can be defined as a prescribed size of the sensitivity-related neighbourhood around any point in the parameter space (analogous to step size Δx for numerical estimation of derivatives). We discuss that perturbation scale is inherent to any (local and global) SA approach, and explain how derivative-based SA approaches (e.g., method of Morris) focus on small-scale perturbations, while variance-based approaches (e.g., method of Sobol) focus on large-scale perturbations. We employ a novel variogram-based approach, called Variogram Analysis of Response Surfaces (VARS), which bridges derivative- and variance-based approaches. Our analyses with different real-world environmental models demonstrate significant implications of subjectivity in the perturbation-scale choice and the need for strategies to address these implications. It is further shown how VARS can uniquely characterize the perturbation-scale dependency and generate sensitivity measures that encompass all sensitivity-related information across the full spectrum of perturbation scales. |
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| Keywords: | Sensitivity analysis Perturbation scale VARS Environmental modelling MESH SWAT HydroGeoSphere |
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