Identifiability analysis in conceptual sewer modelling

For a sufficient calibration of an environmental model not only parameter sensitivity but also parameter identifiability is an important issue. In identifiability analysis it is possible to analyse whether changes in one parameter can be compensated by appropriate changes of the other ones within a given uncertainty range. Parameter identifiability is conditional to the information content of the calibration data and consequently conditional to a certain measurement layout (i.e. types of measurements, number and location of measurement sites, temporal resolution of measurements etc.). Hence the influence of number and location of measurement sites on the number of identifiable parameters can be investigated. In the present study identifiability analysis is applied to a conceptual model of a combined sewer system aiming to predict the combined sewer overflow emissions. Different measurement layouts are tested and it can be shown that only 13 of the most sensitive catchment areas (represented by the model parameter ‘effective impervious area’) can be identified when overflow measurements of the 20 highest overflows and the runoff to the waste water treatment plant are used for calibration. The main advantage of this method is very low computational costs as the number of required model runs equals the total number of model parameters. Hence, this method is a valuable tool when analysing large models with a long runtime and many parameters.