Impact of spatial distribution information of rainfall in runoff simulation using deep learning method

Rainfall-runoff modeling is of great importance for flood forecast and water management. Hydrological modeling is the traditional and commonly used approach for rainfall-runoff modeling. In recent years, with the development of artificial intelligence technology, deep learning models, such as the long short-term memory (LSTM) model, are increasingly applied to rainfall-runoff modeling. However, current works do not consider the effect of rainfall spatial distribution information on the results. Focusing on 10 catchments from the Catchment Attributes and Meteorology for Large-Sample Studies (CAMELS) dataset, this study compared the performance of LSTM with different look-back windows (7, 15, 30, 180, 365 d) for future 1 d discharges and for future multi-day simulations (7, 15 d). Secondly, the differences between LSTMs as individual models trained independently in each catchment and LSTMs as regional models were also compared across 10 catchments. All models are driven by catchment mean rainfall data and spatially distributed rainfall data, respectively. The results demonstrate that regardless of whether LSTMs are trained independently in each catchment or trained as regional models, rainfall data with spatial information improves the performance of LSTMs compared to models driven by mean rainfall data. The LSTM as a regional model did not obtain better results than LSTM as an individual model in our study. However, we found that using spatially distributed rainfall data can reduce the difference between LSTM as a regional model and LSTM as an individual model. In summary, (a) adding information about the spatial distribution of the data is another way to improve the performance of LSTM where long-term rainfall records are absent, and (b) understanding and utilizing the spatial distribution information can help improve the performance of deep learning models in runoff simulations.

Automated summary

Rainfall-runoff modeling is an important tool for flood forecast and water management. This study compared the performance of LSTM models with different look-back windows and found that rainfall data with spatial information improves the performance of the models. Additionally, using spatially distributed rainfall data can reduce the difference between regional and individual LSTM models.