When are models useful? Revisiting the quantification of reality checks

D. Koutsoyiannis, When are models useful? Revisiting the quantification of reality checks, Water, 17 (2), 264, doi:10.3390/w17020264, 2025.

[doc_id=2522]

[English]

The Nash-Sutcliffe efficiency remains the best metric for measuring the appropriateness of a model and reflects a culture developed in hydrology to test models against reality before using them. This metric is not without problems, and alternative metrics have been proposed subsequently. Here, the concept of knowable moments is exploited to provide robust metrics that assess not only the second-order properties of the process of interest but also high-order moments which provide information for the entire distribution function of the process of interest. This information may be useful in hydrological tasks, as most hydrological processes are non-Gaussian. The proposed concepts are illustrated, also in relationship to existing ones, using a large-scale comparison of climatic model outputs for precipitation with reality for the last 84 years on hemispheric and continental scales.

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Tagged under: Climate stochastics, Stochastics