How to estimate and calibrate the Borselli Factors

Science, Research & Data
1

Hello,

I’m currently trying to estimate the sediment yield of three basins in Costa Rica using the SDR module, however, I’d like to ask if there is a way to calculate or at least narrow down the possible values of the Borselli factors “k” and “IC0”?

The problem is that there is no information available of the observed data to calibrate the model, so I wonder if there is a way to estimate the Borselli factors in order to somehow accurately estimate the sediment volumes.

Thank you very much.

2

Hi @ems2709 ,

Thanks posting and welcome to the NatCap forums! This is a great question. The only thing I can think to point you towards is the Hamel et al (2015) paper (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scitotenv.2015.04.027).

Maybe @RafaSchmitt or @rich could speak more to this.

Cheers,

Doug

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4

Hi @ems2709 -

In all of the projects I’ve done, if we don’t have observed data to do a sensitivity analysis with, we just use the default values for k and IC0 that are given in the User Guide. You could still do a sort of sensitivity analysis by adjusting these values by, say, +/- 10% to see how this affects the patterns, given what you know about the landscape. If not much changes, then perhaps the default values are fine. Since you don’t have observed data for calibration, you won’t be confident in the absolute values anyway, so it’s most important to make sure that the High->Low values and patterns are being captured.

I’ll also be interested to hear what Rafa has to say.

~ Stacie

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