Investigating the benefits of a preliminary sensitivity analysis on urban drainage model parameterization

<p dir="ltr">The work presents a methodology for the event-based calibration of urban drainage models after a preliminary definition of the most impacting parameters on the model outputs. The procedure is based on two steps, namely the application of a local sensitivity analysis (SA) for the identification of influent parameters, and the calibration of the model on each event considering the reduced set of influent parameters by means of an optimizer. The methodology is applied to the Cascina Scala urban catchment in Pavia, northern Italy, for which a rainfall/runoff dataset is available for several events. Results prove very good estimation performance of the model parameterized with the proposed approach to the observation data and a significant computational cost reduction.</p><p dir="ltr">This paper was presented at the 21st Computing and Control in the Water Industry Conference (CCWI 2025) at the University of Sheffield (1st - 3rd September 2025).</p>