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Information theory–based approach for location of monitoring water level gauges in polders
Author(s) -
Alfonso Leonardo,
Lobbrecht Arnold,
Price Roland
Publication year - 2010
Publication title -
water resources research
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.863
H-Index - 217
eISSN - 1944-7973
pISSN - 0043-1397
DOI - 10.1029/2009wr008101
Subject(s) - computer science , pairwise comparison , water level , environmental science , data mining , flood myth , entropy (arrow of time) , data collection , information theory , hydrology (agriculture) , operations research , civil engineering , statistics , engineering , artificial intelligence , mathematics , geotechnical engineering , geography , cartography , physics , archaeology , quantum mechanics
Data collection is a critical activity in the management of water systems because it supports informed decision making. Data are collected by means of monitoring networks in which water level gauges are of particular interest because of their implications for flood management. This paper introduces a number of modifications to previously published methods that use information theory to design hydrological monitoring networks in order to make the methods applicable to the design of water level monitors for highly controlled polder systems. The new contributions include the use of a hydrodynamic model for entropy analysis, the introduction of the quantization concept to filter out noisy time series, and the use of total correlation to evaluate the performance of three different pairwise dependence criteria. The resulting approach, water level monitoring design in polders (WMP), is applied to a polder in the Pijnacker region, Netherlands. Results show that relatively few monitors are adequate to collect the information of a polder area in spite of its large number of target water levels. It is found, in addition, that the directional information transfer DIT YX is more effective in finding independent monitors, whereas DIT XY is better for locating sets of monitors with high joint information content. WMP proves to be a suitable and simple method as part of the design of monitoring networks for polder systems.