Stepwise decomposition-integration-prediction framework for runoff forecasting considering boundary correction

Predicting river runoff accurately is of substantial significance for flood control, water resource allocation, and basin ecological dispatching. To explore the reasonable and effective application of time series decomposition in runoff fore-casting, this study proposed a novel stepwise decomposition-integration-prediction considering boundary correction (SDIPBC) framework by using the stepwise decomposition sampling method and multi-input neural network. On this basis, we implemented a hybrid forecasting model combining seasonal-trend decomposition procedures based on loess (STL) with the long short-term memory (LSTM) network called STL-LSTM (SDIPBC) to estimate mid-long term river runoff. The reliability of the method was assessed using the historical runoff series of the Lianghekou and Jinping I Reservoirs in the Yalong River Basin, China, and developed several single models and hybrid models for com-parative experiments. The results show that the existing decomposition-based hybrid forecasting frameworks are not suitable for practical runoff forecasting. The proposed SDIPBC framework can avoid using future information and im-prove the prediction accuracy of the single prediction model. For the Nash-Sutcliffe efficiency coefficient (NSE), the ten-day runoff forecasting accuracy of STL-LSTM (SDIPBC) in Lianghekou reservoir and Jinping I Reservoirs reached 0.845 and 0.862 respectively, which improved 1.81 % and 2.38 % than the single LSTM model, indicating that this is a practical and reliable decomposition-based hybrid runoff forecasting method.

Automated summary

This study proposed a stepwise decomposition-integration-prediction framework (SDIPBC) considering boundary correction and combined it with the STL-LSTM model for mid-long term river runoff estimation. The results demonstrated that the SDIPBC framework improved the accuracy of the single prediction model and proved to be a practical and reliable runoff forecasting method.