Data collection strategy for building rainfall-runoff LSTM model predicting daily runoff

Abstract

In this study, after developing an LSTM-based deep learning model for estimating daily runoff in the Soyang River Dam basin, the accuracy of the model for various combinations of model structure and input data was investigated. A model was built based on the database consisting of average daily precipitation, average daily temperature, average daily wind speed (input up to here), and daily average flow rate (output) during the first 12 years (1997.1.1-2008.12.31). The Nash-Sutcliffe Model Efficiency Coefficient (NSE) and RMSE were examined for validation using the flow discharge data of the later 12 years (2009.1.1-2020.12.31). The combination that showed the highest accuracy was the case in which all possible input data (12 years of daily precipitation, weather temperature, wind speed) were used on the LSTM model structure with 64 hidden units. The NSE and RMSE of the verification period were 0.862 and 76.8 m3/s, respectively. When the number of hidden units of LSTM exceeds 500, the performance degradation of the model due to overfitting begins to appear, and when the number of hidden units exceeds 1000, the overfitting problem becomes prominent. A model with very high performance (NSE=0.8~0.84) could be obtained when only 12 years of daily precipitation was used for model training. A model with reasonably high performance (NSE=0.63-0.85) when only one year of input data was used for model training. In particular, an accurate model (NSE=0.85) could be obtained if the one year of training data contains a wide magnitude of flow events such as extreme flow and droughts as well as normal events. If the training data includes both the normal and extreme flow rates, input data that is longer than 5 years did not significantly improve the model performance.