Comparison of ARIMA and Transfer Function (TF) models in Water Temperature simulation in dam - Lake Thesaurus, eastern Macedonia, Greece

Abstract

In the present work, two modelling and forecasting techniques were evaluated on the basis of: a) their efficiency to forecast and b) their ability to utilize auxiliary environmental information: ARIMA and Transfer Function (TF) models. For this purpose, almost three years (2005-2007) daily measurements of Water Temperature (Tw) data in four different depths (1 m, 20 m, 40m and 70 m) of Thesaurus dam-lake in River Nestos, were used to obtain the best models for these time series. For all seven models, the Mean Square Error (MSE) was calculated and used to evaluate the accuracy of the forecast and to compare the forecasting ability of each approach. © 2010 Taylor & Francis Group, London.