hydrology Hydrology () is the scientific study of the movement, distribution, and management of water on Earth and other planets, including the water cycle, water resources, and environmental watershed sustainability. A practitioner of hydrology is calle ...

, behavioral modeling is a

modeling A model is an informative representation of an object, person or system. The term originally denoted the plans of a building in late 16th-century English, and derived via French and Italian ultimately from Latin ''modulus'', a measure. Models c ...

approach that focuses on the modeling of the behavior of hydrological

system A system is a group of Interaction, interacting or interrelated elements that act according to a set of rules to form a unified whole. A system, surrounded and influenced by its environment (systems), environment, is described by its boundaries, ...

s. The behavioral modeling approach makes the main assumption that every system, given its environment, has a most

probable Probability is the branch of mathematics concerning numerical descriptions of how likely an event is to occur, or how likely it is that a proposition is true. The probability of an event is a number between 0 and 1, where, roughly speaking ...

behavior. This most probable behavior can be either determined directly based on the

observable In physics, an observable is a physical quantity that can be measured. Examples include position and momentum. In systems governed by classical mechanics, it is a real-valued "function" on the set of all possible system states. In quantum ph ...

system characteristics and expert knowledge or, the most frequent case, has to be inferred from the available information and a

likelihood The likelihood function (often simply called the likelihood) represents the probability of random variable realizations conditional on particular values of the statistical parameters. Thus, when evaluated on a given sample, the likelihood funct ...

function that encodes the

probability Probability is the branch of mathematics concerning numerical descriptions of how likely an Event (probability theory), event is to occur, or how likely it is that a proposition is true. The probability of an event is a number between 0 and ...

of some assumed behaviors. This modeling approach has been proposed by Sivapalan et al. (2006) in watershed hydrology.

References

*Sivapalan, M., et al. (2006), Behavioural modelling - A new approach for hydrologic prediction, paper presented at the worksho
''Preferential flow and transport processes in soil''
November 4-9, 2006, Ascona,Switzerland. Hydrology

See also

References