Stochastic Simulation of Daily Suspended Sediment Concentration Using Multivariate Copulas

Abstract

Estimation of daily suspended sediment concentration (SSC) is required for water resources and environment management. In this paper, a copula-based stochastic method was proposed for daily SSC simulation. Here, the multivariate copula function, constructed based on a bivariate copula and two bivariate conditional probability distributions, was used to model the temporal and cross dependence structures in daily SSCs. Then, the daily SSCs were generated by sampling from the multivariate conditional distribution. As a result, synthetic long-term SSCs data beyond the limited observation period can be provided for water resources managers, which plays a critical role in accurately estimating frequency and magnitude of extreme SSCs events. The proposed method was under rigorous examination by applying to a case study at Pingshan station in the Jinsha River Basin, China. Results showed that the generated daily SSC sequences not only had a high degree of accuracy in preserving the statistical characteristics of the daily SSC observations, but also captured both the temporal correlation and the cross-correlation between the daily streamflow and daily SSC. Specifically, the average daily relative error values corresponding to mean, standard deviation, skewness, lag-1 temporal correlation, and cross correlation were 0.87%, 4.24%, 7.52%, 0.51% and 2.02%, respectively. The multivariate copula framework proposed here can accurately and efficiently generate long-term daily SSC data for water resources management such as frequency analysis and risk assessment of extreme SSC events.