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Advancing ML and AI Frameworks for Enhanced Hydrologic Prediction


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Created: Jul 17, 2026 at 4:15 p.m. (UTC)
Last updated: Jul 18, 2026 at 5:43 a.m. (UTC)
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Abstract

The National Water Model (NWM), NOAA's operational physics-based hydrologic model, provides continental streamflow estimates but carries a systematic local bias, a consistent over- or under-estimation that varies by site and season and limits local use. We tested whether different machine learning algorithms (a simple recurrent network, a gated recurrent unit, a long short-term memory network, and a Transformer) can reduce this bias and asked where correction is most useful across three sites in three states (NC, VA, and SD). We trained these four sequence models under two setups: a residual setup that learns the difference between NWM discharge and observed USGS discharge and adds the learned correction back to NWM, and a direct setup that predicts observed discharge directly rather than a correction to NWM, with NWM still among its inputs. Records were split 70% training, 15% validation, 15% testing. We combined the models by simple averaging, error-weighted averaging, and constrained stacking, tuned and scored with time-ordered (walk-forward) cross-validation on a withheld recent block. The workflow was applied to three unregulated USGS gauges spanning NWM skill (Kling-Gupta Efficiency, KGE) from 2010–2020 at hourly resolution: Watauga River (high skill), New River (moderate), and Little Spearfish Creek, a groundwater-fed karst spring (poor). Correction gains increased as NWM skill decreased: KGE improved by +0.12 at Watauga, +0.31 at New River, and +6.90 at Little Spearfish, with corrected KGE reaching 0.83, 0.78, and 0.50 respectively. The residual setup performed best where NWM was reliable. Overall, ML correction generalized across regimes and added the most value where NWM skill was lowest, though at the karst spring it hit a ceiling set by driving information absent from the inputs.

Subject Keywords

Coverage

Spatial

Coordinate System/Geographic Projection:
WGS 84 EPSG:4326
Coordinate Units:
Decimal degrees
North Latitude
46.3494°
East Longitude
-59.0000°
South Latitude
32.2392°
West Longitude
-103.9356°

Temporal

Start Date:
End Date:

Content

How to Cite

AKINADE, B., Omar, A., Panta, S., Pineda-Castellanos, S. R., Javidian, M. A., Mehan, S. (2026). Advancing ML and AI Frameworks for Enhanced Hydrologic Prediction, HydroShare, http://www.hydroshare.org/resource/71e3c9ef40b54a289c65513763a3edd4

This resource is shared under the Creative Commons Attribution CC BY.

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
CC-BY

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