A novel workflow for streamflow prediction in the presence of missing gauge observations

Abstract

Streamflow predictions are vital for detecting flood and drought events. Such predictions are even more critical to Sub-Saharan African regions that are vulnerable to the increasing frequency and intensity of such events. These regions are sparsely gaged, with few available gaging stations that are often plagued with missing data due to various causes, such as harsh environmental conditions and constrained operational resources. This work presents a novel workflow for predicting streamflow in the presence of missing gage observations. We leverage bias correction of the Group on Earth Observations Global Water and Sustainability Initiative ECMWF streamflow service (GESS) forecasts for missing data imputation and predict future streamflow using the state-of-the-art temporal fusion transformers (TFTs) at 10 river gaging stations in the Benin Republic. We show by simulating missingness in a testing period that GESS forecasts have a significant bias that results in poor imputation performance over the 10 Beninese stations. Our findings suggest that overall bias correction by Elastic Net and Gaussian Process regression achieves superior performance relative to traditional imputation by established methods. We also show that the TFT yields high predictive skill and further provides explanations for predictions through the weights of its attention mechanism. The findings of this work provide a basis for integrating Global streamflow prediction model data and the state-of-the-art machine learning models into operational early-warning decision-making systems in resource-constrained countries vulnerable to drought and flooding due to extreme weather events.

Global hydrological reanalyses: The value of river discharge information for world‐wide downstream applications – The example of the Global Flood Awareness System GloFAS

“…Abate et al (2023) also found positive results by using GloFAS hydrological reanalysis and actual evapotranspiration (AET) from Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) to calibrate the SWAT model for the ungauged Kobo‐Golina catchment in Ethiopia. Alternatively, hydrological reanalyses can be used to extend existing observational records (Mbuvha et al, 2022) creating a longer record on which to calibrate hydrological models. Care must be taken to ensure that good performance of the hydrological model is expected for the basin of interest and a pre‐processing step may be required before application.…”

Monthly rainfall prediction using artificial neural network (case study: Republic of Benin)

“…To predict, a dense neural network layer connects the cell and hidden states to output (y out , Eq. 3) after the input sequence (Mbuvha et al, 2023).…”