Entropy-Copula Method for Single-Site Monthly Streamflow Simulation

Abstract

An entropy-copula method is proposed for single-site monthly streamflow simulation. In this method, the joint distribution of adjacent monthly streamflows is constructed using the copula method, whereas the marginal distribution of streamflow for each month is derived using the entropy method. Then, the conditional distribution is derived from which monthly streamflow is generated. Moment statistics of monthly streamflow (such as mean, standard deviation and skewness) can be modeled by the entropy-based marginal distribution while the dependence structure between streamflows of adjacent months can be modeled by the copula-based joint distribution. The proposed entropy-copula method can be extended by incorporating an aggregate variable for modeling the interannual dependence. Application to the simulation of monthly streamflow from the Colorado River illustrates the effectiveness of the proposed method.