Assessing the impact of land use change on hydrology by ensemble modeling (LUCHEM)

An ensemble of 10 hydrological models was applied to the same set of land use change scenarios. There was general agreement about the direction of changes in the mean annual discharge and 90% discharge percentile predicted by the ensemble members, although a considerable range in the magnitude of predictions for the scenarios and catchments under consideration was obvious. Differences in the magnitude of the increase were attributed to the different mean annual actual evapotranspiration rates for each land use type. The ensemble of model runs was further analyzed with deterministic and probabilistic ensemble methods. The deterministic ensemble method based on a trimmed mean resulted in a single somewhat more reliable scenario prediction. The probabilistic reliability ensemble averaging (REA) method allowed a quantification of the model structure uncertainty in the scenario predictions. It was concluded that the use of a model ensemble has greatly increased our confidence in the reliability of the model