Toward Downscaling Storage-Discharge Dynamics: Training Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) model for Simulating Nonlinear Storage-Discharge Relations at The Rum River Watershed, MN

Flooding is one of the most financially devastating natural hazards in the world. Studying storage-discharge relations can have the potential to improve existing flood forecasting systems, which are based on rainfall-runoff models. This presentation will assess the non-linear relation between daily water storage (ΔS) and discharge (Q) simulated by physical-based hydrological models at the Rum River Watershed, a HUC8 watershed in Minnesota, between 1995-2015, by training Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks and other machine learning (ML) algorithms. Currently, linear regression models do not adequately represent the relationship between the simulated total ΔS and total Q at the HUC-8 watershed (R² = 0.3667). Since ML algorithms have been used for predicting the outputs that represent arbitrary non-linear functions between predictors and predictands, they will be used for improving the accuracy of the non-linear relation of the storage-discharge dynamics. This research will mainly use LSTM networks, the time-series deep learning neural network that has already been used for predicting rainfall-runoff relations. The LSTM network will be trained to evaluate the storage-discharge relationship by comparing two sets of non-linear hydrological variables simulated by the semi-distributed Hydrological Simulated Program-Fortran (HSPF): the relationship between the simulated discharges and input hydrological variables at selected HUC-8 watersheds, including air temperatures, cloud covers, dew points, potential evapotranspiration, precipitations, solar radiations, wind speeds, and total water storage, and the dynamics between simulated discharge and input variables that do not include the total water storage. The result of this research will lay the foundation for assessing the accuracy of downscaled storage-discharge dynamics by applying similar methods to evaluate the storage-discharge dynamics at small-scaled, HUC-12 watersheds. Furthermore, its results have the potentials for us to evaluate whether downscaling of storage-discharge dynamics at the HUC-12 watershed can improve the accuracy of predicting discharge by comparing the result from the HUC-8 and the HUC-12 watersheds.