Comparison of the performance of a hydrologic model and a deep learning technique for rainfall- runoff analysis

Rainfall-runoff analysis is the most important and basic analysis in water resources management and planning. Conventional rainfall-runoff analysis methods generally have used hydrologic models. Rainfall-runoff analysis should consider complex interactions in the water cycle process, including precipitation and evapotranspiration. In this study, rainfall-runoff analysis was performed using a deep learning technique that can capture the relationship between a hydrological model used in the existing methodology and the data itself. The study was conducted in the Yeongsan River basin, which forms a large-scale agricultural area even after industrialization, as the study area. As the hydrology model, SWAT (Soil and Water Assessment Tool) was used, and for the deep learning method, a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) network was used among RNNs (Recurrent Neural Networks) mainly used in time series analysis. As a result of the analysis, the correlation coefficient and NSE (NashSutcliffe Efficiency), which are performance indicators of the hydrological model, showed higher performance in the LSTM network. In general, the LSTM network performs better with a longer calibration period. In other words, it is worth considering that a data-based model such as an LSTM network will be more useful than a hydrological model that requires a variety of topographical and meteorological data in a watershed with sufficient historical hydrological data. (c) 2022 The Shanghai Typhoon Institute of China Meteorological Administration. Publishing services by Elsevier B.V. on behalf of KeAi Communication Co. Ltd.