evaluation of the certainty of system performance measures generated by the South Florida Water Management Model

The South Florida Water Management Model was developed to evaluate proposed alternatives for the south Florida regional hydrologic system. The degree of certainty of the computed system performance measures is required to correctly apply these measures for evaluation and selection of appropriate water resources policies and investments. Initially, a sensitivity matrix is defined which summarizes the model output sensitivity to incremental changes of key parameters. The method of singular value decomposition is applied to the sensitivity matrix to better understand relations between parameters and output variables. Finally, parameter uncertainty is compared to that of total predictive uncertainty of the system performance measures.