John Grego
Department of Statistics
University of South Carolina
Afternoons with Wilma
A Calibration Story
When FEMA developed new FIRM's (Flood Insurance Rate Maps) for the Congaree
River, water levels developed from deterministic engineering models for
floodplain hydraulics were often presented without any estimate of error.
These hydraulics models are calibrated using information from historic flood
events. As an offshoot of my interest in the FIRMs, I investigated whether
the calibration process provided insights into estimation error for
floodplain water levels. Wilma Sims (M.S. Statistics--2000) and I studied
Bayesian modeling approaches for calibration of deterministic models as a
reading course, and applied our findings to HEC-2 (now often implemented as
HEC-RAS), a standard one-dimensional hydraulics model.
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