Wood, A and Smith, P.J and Beven, K (2011) On the colour and spin of epistemic error(and what we might do about it). Hydrology and Earth System Sciences.

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Abstract

Disinformation as a result of epistemic error is an issue in hydrological modelling. In particular the way in which the colour in model residuals resulting from epistemic errors should be expected to be non-stationary means that it is difficult to justify the spin that the structure of residu- als can be properly represented by statistical likelihood func- tions. To do so would be to greatly overestimate the infor- mation content in a set of calibration data and increase the possibility of both Type I and Type II errors. Some princi- ples of trying to identify periods of disinformative data prior to evaluation of a model structure of interest, are discussed. An example demonstrates the effect on the estimated param- eter values of a hydrological model.

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