Identifying and Evaluating Chaotic Behavior in Hydro-Meteorological Processes

Abstract EN

The aim of this study is to identify and evaluate chaotic behavior in hydro-meteorological processes.

This study poses the two hypotheses to identify chaotic behavior of the processes.

First, assume that the input data is the significant factor to provide chaotic characteristics to output data.

Second, assume that the system itself is the significant factor to provide chaotic characteristics to output data.

For solving this issue, hydro-meteorological time series such as precipitation, air temperature, discharge, and storage volume were collected in the Great Salt Lake and Bear River Basin, USA.

The time series in the period of approximately one year were extracted from the original series using the wavelet transform.

The generated time series from summation of sine functions were fitted to each series and used for investigating the hypotheses.

Then artificial neural networks had been built for modeling the reservoir system and the correlation dimension was analyzed for the evaluation of chaotic behavior between inputs and outputs.

From the results, we found that the chaotic characteristic of the storage volume which is output is likely a byproduct of the chaotic behavior of the reservoir system itself rather than that of the input data.