So, What’s the Answer? Moving Beyond the “Point Estimate”

Abstract:

Uncertainty is an ever present issue in hydrology. The immense difficulties in resolving complex processes and their spatio-temporal variations, combined with a lack of observations means the accuracy of our predictions is often unknown. An immense amount of research is undertaken to quantify uncertainty in hydrologic predictions. With all this effort, there seems to be little appreciation of how this uncertainty quantification will be utilised in practice. Planners and decision makers who rely on modelling output from hydrologists and engineers are traditionally interested in a single point estimate – for instance, a single 1% Annual Exceedance Probability flow value. How can water scientists encourage practitioners to move beyond a “point estimate” mentality to appreciate the potentially wide range of uncertainty in our estimates? How can this uncertainty be translated into an appropriate risk based decision making framework? In this talk I investigate some of the problems with adopting a single answer for decision making and discuss some ways to promote a greater appreciation of uncertainty in practice.