Behavioral modeling in hydrology

In hydrology, behavioral modeling is a modelling approach that focuses on the behavior of environmental systems rather than on the underlying physical or biological mechanisms. Behavior can be understood either as a response or as a structure of the system. The system behavior is intrinsically dynamic.

The behavioral modeling approach makes the main assumption that every system, given its environment, has a most probable behaviour. This most probable behavior can be either determined directly based on observable system characteristics and expert knowledge or, the most frequent case, has to be inferred from the available information and a likelihood function that encodes the probability of some assumed behaviours.

This modeling approach has been introduced recently by Sivapalan et al. (2006) in watershed hydrology to create a unifying framework for hydrology and ultimately for all environmental modelers concerned with prediction of environmental processes at the watershed scale.

References

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