Enhanced watershed model evaluation incorporating hydrologic signatures and consistency within efficient surrogate multi-objective optimization

This paper presents a new framework for calibrating computationally expensive watershed models with multi-objective optimization methods and hydrological consistency analysis. The analysis evaluates different algorithms' efficiencies for finding watershed model calibration solutions within a limited budget. Two surrogate multi-objective algorithms GOMORS and ParEGO are compared to five evolutionary algorithms without surrogates on two watershed models. We test the algorithms’ performance with two multi-objective formulations (i.e., threshold-based flow separation and decomposition of the Nash-Sutcliffe Efficiency (NSE)). Results indicate that the surrogate-based GOMORS is the most computationally efficient overall. We also propose a framework to select among the calibration solutions obtained from multi-objective optimization using different hydrologic signatures. GOMORS is assessed for its ability to identify hydrologically acceptable calibrations. The decomposition of NSE is the most effective calibration formulation in terms of hydraulic consistency analysis. In addition, hydrologic signatures could be used effectively to filter non-dominated solutions obtained from multi-objective optimization.