Integrated urban water modelling with uncertainty analysis

Abstract

In the last twenty years, the scientific world has paid particular care towards the problems that involve the environment. Accordingly, several researches were developed to describe phenomena that take place during both wet and dry periods and to increase the knowledge in this field. In particular, attention was addressed towards the problems linked with receiving water body pollution because of the impact of rain water in the urban environment. In order to obtain a good description of the problem, it is important to analyse both quantity and quality aspects connected with all the transformation phases that characterise the urban water cycle. Today, according to this point, integrated modelling approach is spreading, aiming to find solutions to improve the quality characteristics of the receiving water body. Because several models are connected together for analysing the fate of pollutants from the sources on the urban catchment to the final recipient, classical problems connected with the selection and calibration of parameters are amplified by the complexity of the modelling approach increasing the uncertainty and reducing the reliability connected with a model's application. For this reason, a parsimonious integrated modelling approach has been developed and its uncertainty has been evaluated adopting the well known GLUE framework. For the purpose of the study, the uncertainty analysis has been applied to a “semi–hypothetic” case study obtained connecting Fossolo catchment