Hydrological model evaluation and comparison through uncertainty recognition and quantification

A method to identify hydrological prediction uncertainties is proposed through recognizing and quantifying different uncertainty sources in hydrological modeling. Based on this methodology, an index which originates from the Nash-Sutcliffe efficiency measure, named the Model Structure Indicating Index (MSII) is developed to quantify model structure uncertainty. The results of hydrological model comparisons show that the MSII can reflect the goodness of a hydrological model structure well. The index can be used as a tool for implementing quantitative comparison and selection of models.