What Role Does Hydrological Science Play in the Age of Machine Learning?

Abstract

This paper is derived from a keynote talk given at the Google's 2020 Flood Forecasting Meets Machine Learning Workshop. Recent experiments applying deep learning to rainfall-runoff simulation indicate that there is significantly more information in large-scale hydrological data sets than hydrologists have been able to translate into theory or models. While there is a growing interest in machine learning in the hydrological sciences community, in many ways, our community still holds deeply subjective and nonevidence-based preferences for models based on a certain type of “process understanding” that has historically not translated into accurate theory, models, or predictions. This commentary is a call to action for the hydrology community to focus on developing a quantitative understanding of where and when hydrological process understanding is valuable in a modeling discipline increasingly dominated by machine learning. We offer some potential perspectives and preliminary examples about how this might be accomplished.