Automating Urban Hydrology Models: What do Hydrologists Expect from Model Developers?

Abstract

Availability of domain knowledge is significant for successful system automation. Therefore the input and output of the processes should be clearly understood. In the case of urban flood management, complex, specific and automated hydrologic models are required. For conceptual automated models, input and output needs must be clearly understood. The present work is to identify such needs through consultation of local and international hydrologic model developers. A comprehensive questionnaire was developed for consultation. The 3rd version of the questionnaire was answered by 58 hydrologists from Sri Lanka, India, Nepal, Nigeria, UK and Japan. Hydrologists show less interest on input data format because they are highly competent in data conversions using different techniques. Nevertheless, a majority stresses the need of to correctly interpret the outputs. Hence the work identified that, when developing a tool, system developers need to pay more attention to the conversion of the hydro model output to end user understandable format specially in the case of urban flood management decision makers.