Forecasting Water Levels of Catalan Reservoirs

Abstract

Reservoirs are largely natural or artificial lakes used as a source of water supply for society daily applications. However, reservoirs are limited natural resources which water levels vary according to annual rainfalls and other natural events. Therefore, prediction techniques are helpful to manage the water used more efficiently. This paper compares state-of-the-art methods to predict the water level in Catalan reservoirs comparing two approaches: using the water level uniquely, uni-variant, and adding meteorological data, multi-variant. With respect to relate works, our contribution includes a longer times series prediction keeping a high precision. The results return that combining Support Vector Machine and the multi-variant approach provides the highest precision with an $$R^2$$ value of 0.99.