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Abstract Streamflow prediction is a long‐standing hydrologic problem. Development of models for streamflow prediction often requires incorporation of catchment physical descriptors to characterize the associated complex hydrological processes. Across different scales of catchments, these physical descriptors also allow models to extrapolate hydrologic information from one catchment to others, a process referred to as “regionalization”. Recently, in gauged basin scenarios, deep learning models have been shown to achieve state of the art regionalization performance by building a global hydrologic model. These models predict streamflow given catchment physical descriptors and weather forcing data. However, these physical descriptors are by their nature uncertain, sometimes incomplete, or even unavailable in certain cases, which limits the applicability of this approach. In this paper, we show that by assigning a vector of random values as a surrogate for catchment physical descriptors, we can achieve robust regionalization performance under a gauged prediction scenario. Our results show that the deep learning model using our proposed random vector approach achieves a predictive performance comparable to that of the model using actual physical descriptors. The random vector approach yields robust performance under different data sparsity scenarios and deep learning model selections. Furthermore, based on the use of random vectors, high‐dimensional characterization improves regionalization performance in gauged basin scenario when physical descriptors are uncertain, or insufficient.
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Transfer Learning Using Inaccurate Physics Rule for Streamflow Prediction
Accurate streamflow prediction is critical for ensuring water supply and detecting floods, while also providing essential hydrological inputs for other scientific models in fields such as climate and agriculture.Recently, deep learning models have been shown to achieve state-of-the-art regionalization performance by building a global hydrologic model. These models predict streamflow given catchment physical characteristics and weather forcing data.However, these models are only focused on gauged basins and cannot adapt to ungaugaed basins, i.e., basins without training data. Prediction in Ungauged Basins (PUB) is considered one of the most important challenges in hydrology, as most basins in the United States and around the world have no observations. In this work, we propose a meta-transfer learning approach by enhancing imperfect physics equations that facilitate model adaptation. Intuitively, physical equations can often be used to regularize deep learning models to achieve robust regionalization performance under gauged scenarios, but they can be inaccurate due to the simplified representation of physics. We correct such uncertainty in physical equation by residual approximation and let these corrected equations guide the model training process. We evaluated the proposed method for predicting daily streamflow on the catchment attributes and meteorology for large-sample studies (CAMELS) dataset. The experiment results on hydrological data over 19 years demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in ungauged scenarios.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2028001
- PAR ID:
- 10556860
- Publisher / Repository:
- International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence Organization
- Date Published:
- ISBN:
- 978-1-956792-04-1
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 7170 to 7178
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Location:
- Jeju, South Korea
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2024/793
