Monthly and seasonal streamflow forecasting of large dryland catchments in Brazil

Streamflow forecasting in drylands is challenging.Data are scarce,catchments are highly humanmodified and streamflow exhibits strong nonlinear responses to rainfall.The goal of this study was to evaluate the monthly and seasonal streamflow forecasting in two large catchments in the Jaguaribe River Basin in the Brazilian semi-arid area.We adopted four different lead times:one month ahead for monthly scale and two,three and four months ahead for seasonal scale.The gaps of the historic streamflow series were filled up by using rainfall-runoff modelling.Then,time series model techniques were applied,i.e.,the locally constant,the locally averaged,the k-nearest-neighbours algorithm(k-NN)and the autoregressive(AR)model.The criterion of reliability of the validation results is that the forecast is more skillful than streamflow climatology.Our approach outperformed the streamflow climatology for all monthly streamflows.On average,the former was 25%better than the latter.The seasonal streamflow forecasting(SSF)was also reliable(on average,20%better than the climatology),failing slightly only for the high flow season of one catchment(6%worse than the climatology).Considering an uncertainty envelope(probabilistic forecasting),which was considerably narrower than the data standard deviation,the streamflow forecasting performance increased by about 50%at both scales.The forecast errors were mainly driven by the streamflow intra-seasonality at monthly scale,while they were by the forecast lead time at seasonal scale.The best-fit and worst-fit time series model were the k-NN approach and the AR model,respectively.The rainfall-runoff modelling outputs played an important role in improving streamflow forecasting for one streamgauge that showed 35%of data gaps.The developed data-driven approach is mathematical and computationally very simple,demands few resources to accomplish its operational implementation and is applicable to other dryland watersheds.Our findings may be part of drought forecasting systems and potentially help allocating water months in advance.Moreover,the developed strategy can serve as a baseline for more complex streamflow forecast systems.

Comparison of performance of statistical models in forecasting monthly streamflow of Kizil River,China

This paper presents the application of autoregressive integrated moving average （ARIMA）, seasonal ARIMA （SARIMA）, and Jordan-Elman artificial neural networks （ANN） models in forecasting the monthly streamflow of the Kizil River in Xinjiang, China. Two different types of monthly streamflow data （original and deseasonalized data） were used to develop time series and Jordan-Elman ANN models using previous flow conditions as predictors. The one-month-ahead forecasting performances of all models for the testing period （1998-2005） were compared using the average monthly flow data from the Kalabeili gaging station on the Kizil River. The Jordan-Elman ANN models, using previous flow conditions as inputs, resulted in no significant improvement over time series models in one-month-ahead forecasting. The results suggest that the simple time series models （ARIMA and SARIMA） can be used in one-month-ahead streamflow forecasting at the study site with a simple and explicit model structure and a model performance similar to the Jordan-Elman ANN models.

The Application of a Meteo-hydrological Forecasting System with Rainfall Bias Correction in a Small and Medium-sized Catchment

Meteo-hydrological forecasting models are an effective way to generate high-resolution gridded rainfall data for water source research and flood forecast.The quality of rainfall data in terms of both intensity and distribution is very important for establishing a reliable meteo-hydrological forecasting model.To improve the accuracy of rainfall data,the successive correction method is introduced to correct the bias of rainfall,and a meteo-hydrological forecasting model based on WRF and WRF-Hydro is applied for streamflow forecast over the Zhanghe River catchment in China.The performance of WRF rainfall is compared with the China Meteorological Administration Multi-source Precipitation Analysis System(CMPAS),and the simulated streamflow from the model is further studied.It shows that the corrected WRF rainfall is more similar to the CMPAS in both temporal and spatial distribution than the original WRF rainfall.By contrast,the statistical metrics of the corrected WRF rainfall are better.When the corrected WRF rainfall is used to drive the WRF-Hydro model,the simulated streamflow of most events is significantly improved in both hydrographs and volume than that of using the original WRF rainfall.Among the studied events,the largest improvement of the NSE is from-0.68 to 0.67.It proves that correcting the bias of WRF rainfall with the successive correction method can greatly improve the performance of streamflow forecast.In general,the WRF/WRF-Hydro meteo-hydrological forecasting model based on the successive correction method has the potential to provide better streamflow forecast in the Zhanghe River catchment.