Infrastructure Engineering - Research Publications
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ItemJustin Costelloe: a champion of arid-zone water research(Springer Verlag, 2019-11-06)Justin Francis Costelloe (Fig. 1) was born in 1965. He grew up in the mining city of Bendigo (Victoria, Australia) before studying Earth Sciences at the University of Melbourne. He went on to work as an exploration geologist in the mining industry in the dryland regions of Australia and Chile. He developed a love of Australia’s desert landscapes and returned to undertake Masters and PhD studies on arid zone hydrology at the University of Melbourne, before continuing as a research fellow and senior research fellow leading arid zone research projects. Justin was a leader in research aimed at understanding surface water and groundwater in Australia’s arid zone and also made important interdisciplinary contributions linking the hydrology and ecology of the arid zone, with a focus on Australia’s iconic Channel Country and the Great Artesian Basin (GAB).
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ItemPredicting shifts in rainfall-runoff partitioning during multiyear drought: Roles of dry period and catchment characteristics(AMER GEOPHYSICAL UNION, 2016-12-01)
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ItemEquifinality and Flux Mapping: A New Approach to Model Evaluation and Process Representation Under Uncertainty(AMER GEOPHYSICAL UNION, 2019-11-12)
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ItemSimulating Runoff Under Changing Climatic Conditions: A Framework for Model Improvement(American Geophysical Union, 2018-10-01)Rainfall-runoff models are often deficient under changing climatic conditions, yet almost no recent studies propose new or improved model structures, instead focusing on model intercomparison, input sensitivity, and/or quantification of uncertainty. This paucity of progress in model development is (in part) due to the difficulty of distinguishing which cases of model failure are truly caused by structural inadequacy. Here we propose a new framework to diagnose the salient cause of poor model performance in changing climate conditions, be it structural inadequacy, poor parameterization, or data errors. The framework can be applied to a single catchment, although larger samples of catchments are helpful to generalize and/or cross-check results. To generate a diagnosis, multiple historic periods with contrasting climate are defined, and the limits of model robustness and flexibility are explored over each period separately and for all periods together. Numerous data-based checks also supplement the results. Using a case study catchment from Australia, improved inference of structural failure and clearer evaluation of model structural improvements are demonstrated. This framework enables future studies to (i) identify cases where poor simulations are due to poor calibration methods or data errors, remediating these cases without recourse to structural changes; and (ii) use the remaining cases to gain greater clarity into what structural changes are needed to improve model performance in changing climate.
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ItemImproved Rainfall‐Runoff Calibration for Drying Climate: Choice of Objective Function(American Geophysical Union, 2018-05)It has been widely shown that rainfall‐runoff models often provide poor and biased simulations after a change in climate, but evidence suggests existing models may be capable of better simulations if calibration strategies are improved. Common practice is to use “least squares”‐type objective functions, which focus on hydrological behavior during high flows. However, simulation of a drying climate may require a more balanced consideration of other parts of the flow regime, including mid‐low flows and drier years in the calibration period, as a closer analogue of future conditions. Here we systematically test eight objective functions over 86 catchments and five conceptual model structures in southern and eastern Australia. We focus on performance when evaluated over multiyear droughts. The results show significant improvements are possible compared to least squares calibration. In particular, the Refined Index of Agreement (based on sum of absolute error, not sum of squared error) and a new objective function called the Split KGE (which gives equal weight to each year in the calibration series) give significantly better split‐sample results than least squares approaches. This improvement held for all five model structures, regardless of basin characteristics such as slope, vegetation, and across a range of climatic conditions (e.g., mean precipitation between 500 and 1,500 mm/yr). We recommend future studies to avoid least squares approaches (e.g., optimizing NSE or KGE with no prior transformation on streamflow) and adopt these alternative methods, wherever simulations in a drying climate are required.
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ItemThe influence of multiyear drought on the annual rainfall-runoff relationship: An Australian perspective(AMER GEOPHYSICAL UNION, 2015-04-01)
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ItemSimulating runoff under changing climatic conditions: Revisiting an apparent deficiency of conceptual rainfall-runoff models(AMER GEOPHYSICAL UNION, 2016-03-01)
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ItemBias in streamflow projections due to climate-induced shifts in catchment response(AMER GEOPHYSICAL UNION, 2016-02-28)
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ItemIncluding the dynamic relationship between climatic variables and leaf area index in a hydrological model to improve streamflow prediction under a changing climate(COPERNICUS GESELLSCHAFT MBH, 2015-01-01)Abstract. Anthropogenic climate change is projected to enrich the atmosphere with carbon dioxide, change vegetation dynamics and influence the availability of water at the catchment scale. This study combines a nonlinear model for estimating changes in leaf area index (LAI) due to climatic fluctuations with the variable infiltration capacity (VIC) hydrological model to improve catchment streamflow prediction under a changing climate. The combined model was applied to 13 gauged sub-catchments with different land cover types (crop, pasture and tree) in the Goulburn–Broken catchment, Australia, for the "Millennium Drought" (1997–2009) relative to the period 1983–1995, and for two future periods (2021–2050 and 2071–2100) and two emission scenarios (Representative Concentration Pathway (RCP) 4.5 and RCP8.5) which were compared with the baseline historical period of 1981–2010. This region was projected to be warmer and mostly drier in the future as predicted by 38 Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 5 (CMIP5) runs from 15 global climate models (GCMs) and for two emission scenarios. The results showed that during the Millennium Drought there was about a 29.7–66.3 % reduction in mean annual runoff due to reduced precipitation and increased temperature. When drought-induced changes in LAI were included, smaller reductions in mean annual runoff of between 29.3 and 61.4 % were predicted. The proportional increase in runoff due to modeling LAI was 1.3–10.2 % relative to not including LAI. For projected climate change under the RCP4.5 emission scenario, ignoring the LAI response to changing climate could lead to a further reduction in mean annual runoff of between 2.3 and 27.7 % in the near-term (2021–2050) and 2.3 to 23.1 % later in the century (2071–2100) relative to modeling the dynamic response of LAI to precipitation and temperature changes. Similar results (near-term 2.5–25.9 % and end of century 2.6–24.2 %) were found for climate change under the RCP8.5 emission scenario. Incorporating climate-induced changes in LAI in the VIC model reduced the projected declines in streamflow and confirms the importance of including the effects of changes in LAI in future projections of streamflow.