Flood prediction based on climatic signals using wavelet neural network

Large-scale climatic circulation modulates the weather patterns around the world. Understanding the teleconnections between large-scale circulation and local hydro-climatological variables has been a major thrust area of hydro-climatology research. The large-scale circulation is often quantified in terms of sea surface temperature (SST) and sea-level pressure (SLP). In this paper, we investigate the potential of wavelet neural network (WNN) hybrid model to predict maximum monthly discharge of the Madarsoo watershed, North of Iran considering two large-scale climatic signals like SST and SLP as inputs. Error measures like root-mean-square error (RMSE), and mean absolute error along with the correlation measures like coefficient of correlation (R), and Nash–Sutcliffe coefficient (CNS) were used to quantify the performance of prediction of maximum monthly discharge of three different hydrometry stations of the watershed. In all the cases, the WNN hybrid machine learning model was found to be giving superior performance consistently against the standalone artificial neural network (ANN) model and multiple linear regression model to predict the flood discharges of March and August months. The prediction of flood for August which is more devastating is found to be slightly better than the prediction of floods of March, in the stations served with smaller drainage area. The RMSE, R and CNS of Tamer hydrometry station in August were found to be 0.68, 0.996, and 0.99 m3/s, respectively, for the test period by using WNN model against 1.55, 0.989 and 0.95 by ANN model. Moreover, when evaluated for predicting the maximum monthly discharge in March and August between 2012 and 2013, the wavelet-based neural networks performed remarkably well than the ANN.