STAHY Best Paper Award 2023: Dr Wouter Knoben

Congratulations to WISE CDT graduate Dr Wouter Knoben (Cohort 1, Bristol) for being awarded the STAHY Best Paper Award 2023!

The STAHY award is made by the International Commission on Statistical Hydrology, a commission of IAHS (International Association for Hydrological Sciences). The award-winning paper was part of Wouter’s PhD, in the EPSRC-funded WISE CDT (Water Informatics, Science and Engineering). Wouter’s PhD was supervised by Dr Ross Woods (School of Civil, Aerospace and Design Engineering, University of Bristol) and Prof Jim Freer (formerly School of Geographical Sciences, University of Bristol).

The award is for his 2019 HESS paper on “Inherent benchmark or not? Comparing Nash–Sutcliffe and Kling–Gupta efficiency scores”. This paper highlights for the first time a common misinterpretation of the very widely used Kling–Gupta model efficiency score, and provides guidance and suggestions for improved ways of assessing model performance. The paper has already been cited more than 450 times.