Water Level Forecasting based on Deep Learning : A Use Case of Trinity River-Texas-The United States

Quang-Khai Tran, Sa-kwang Song

http://doi.org/10.5626/JOK.2017.44.6.607

This paper presents an attempt to apply Deep Learning technology to solve the problem of forecasting floods in urban areas. We employ Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs), which are suitable for analyzing time series data, to learn observed data of river water and to predict the water level. To test the model, we use water observation data of a station in the Trinity River, Texas, the U.S., with data from 2013 to 2015 for training and data in 2016 for testing. Input of the neural networks is a 16-record-length sequence of 15-minute-interval time-series data, and output is the predicted value of the water level at the next 30 minutes and 60 minutes. In the experiment, we compare three Deep Learning models including standard RNN, RNN trained with Back Propagation Through Time(RNN-BPTT), and Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM). The prediction quality of LSTM can obtain Nash Efficiency exceeding 0.98, while the standard RNN and RNN-BPTT also provide very high accuracy.