Improving streamflow simulation through machine learning-powered data integration and its potential for forecasting in the Western U.S.

Abstract

Accurate streamflow forecasts are crucial but remain challenging for the arid Western United States (U.S.). Recently, machine learning methods such as long short-term memory (LSTM) have exhibited high accuracy in streamflow simulation and strong abilities to integrate observations to enhance performance. This study evaluated an LSTM-based data integration approach that incorporates streamflow (Q) and snow water equivalent (SWE) observations to improve streamflow estimations across different lag times (1–10 d, 1–6 months) and timescales (daily and monthly) over hundreds of basins in the Western U.S. Integrating Q at the daily scale provided the greatest improvements, increasing the median Kling-Gupta Efficiency (KGE) of 646 basins from 0.80 to 0.96 when integrating 1 d lagged Q, and remaining at 0.89 even with a 10 d lag. Integrating Q at the monthly scale also enhanced streamflow estimations, though to a lesser extent than at the daily scale, with the median KGE rising from 0.80 to 0.86 when integrating 1-month lagged streamflow. The next most notable improvement resulted from integrating SWE at the monthly scale, where the median KGE improved to 0.86 when integrating 1-month lagged SWE. Furthermore, SWE integration showed greater benefits at the monthly scale in snow-dominated basins during snowmelt season, which was beneficial for spring-summer flow estimations. However, integrating SWE at the daily scale did not show improvements. These results highlight the potential of this LSTM-based data integration approach for both short-term and long-term streamflow forecasting due to its performance, automation and efficiency.