Estimation of flood warning runoff thresholds in ungauged basins with asymmetric error functions

In many real-world flood forecasting systems, the runoff thresholds for activating warnings or mitigation measures correspond to the flow peaks with a given return period (often the 2-year one, that may be associated with the bankfull discharge). At locations where the historical streamflow records are absent or very limited, the threshold can be estimated with regionally-derived empirical relationships between catchment descriptors and the desired flood quantile. Whatever is the function form, such models are generally parameterised by minimising the mean square error, that assigns equal importance to overprediction or underprediction errors. Considering that the consequences of an overestimated warning threshold (leading to the risk of missing alarms) generally have a much lower level of acceptance than those of an underestimated threshold (leading to the issuance of false alarms), the present work proposes to parameterise the regression model through an asymmetric error function, that penalises more the overpredictions. The estimates by models (feedforward neural networks) with increasing degree of asymmetry are compared with those of a traditional, symmetrically-trained network, in a rigorous cross-validation experiment referred to a database of catchments covering the Italian country. The analysis shows that the use of the asymmetric error function can substantially reduce the number and extent of overestimation errors, if compared to the use of the traditional square errors. Of course such reduction is at the expense of increasing underestimation errors, but the overall accurateness is still acceptable and the results illustrate the potential value of choosing an asymmetric error function when the consequences of missed alarms are more severe than those of false alarms.